Holy Watermelon

Our second episode on the Abrahamic traditions is about Christianity, the most popular religion in the world. Katie and Preston give a high-level overview of the history, traditions, observances, and the handful of common beliefs that are found amongst all denominations.

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Episode Transcript

Katie Dooley  00:00
Hi Preston 

Preston Meyer  00:10
Hi Katie

Katie Dooley  00:12
And welcome you

Preston Meyer  00:13
To the Holy Watermelon podcast.

Katie Dooley  00:19
Today's a big one. 

Preston Meyer  00:21
Yeah, it's the big one. I mean, we say big. There's an awful lot of Christians in this world.

Katie Dooley  00:28
I mean, it's the biggest,

Preston Meyer  00:31
Is it numerically actually the biggest? Okay.

Katie Dooley  00:34
It's followed closely by Islam,

Preston Meyer  00:37
Right. 

Katie Dooley  00:38
Which is two weeks from now. 

Preston Meyer  00:41
We will be talking about many, many religions as we keep going through this path of exploring the Western and Eastern traditions, a label, which of course you'll remember, I don't like 

Katie Dooley  00:51
We don't like it. 

Preston Meyer  00:54
All right. 

Katie Dooley  00:54
So Christianity, Mr. Christian. I feel like you are the more experienced of the two of us on this topic.

Preston Meyer  01:06
I have plenty of experience.

Katie Dooley  01:07
First-hand experience, for once

Preston Meyer  01:11
Yes, I am a Christian theology instructor. I have been for quite a long time I've 

Katie Dooley  01:16
You are Christian

Preston Meyer  01:19
I'm a Christian. I've been involved with Christian community for the last eightteen years. 19 years. It's been 19 years. That's kind of weird. Yeah, I've been teaching theology for a while. That's how where I got. That's the field in which I got my degree is Christian Theology and Religious Studies. Of course, they're two different things. But they have mixed very well for my studies, which is a lot of fun. And is a really complicated subject to try and cram into an episode of our podcast. 

Katie Dooley  01:56
Yeah, I guess we'll see how long we talk for. I've said this before, this might be a two-parter, and it never has been yet, so... 

Preston Meyer  02:04
We'll see. 

Katie Dooley  02:04
We'll see. I think we've done a pretty good job in planning that this will be a very broad, 

Preston Meyer  02:12
But relatively concise,

Katie Dooley  02:13
Broad, but concise summary of beliefs and practices and history. And of course, I know, some of the episodes we have planned going further, we'll dive into more specific areas of Christianity. But if you have any suggestions or recommendations, please drop us a line on Facebook, Instagram, or our email, all of them are [email protected] for the email, and handles are Holy Watermelon Pod, and we'd love to hear your suggestions and feedback for episodes.

Preston Meyer  02:49
Absolutely. If we can make this a discussion that involves your voices in addition to ours, we're gonna enjoy our company a lot better. 

Katie Dooley  02:59
So I think it's fair to say Christianity has a firmer start date than Judaism. 

Preston Meyer  03:05
Yeah, 

Katie Dooley  03:05
Judaism kind of just morphed from older religions.

Preston Meyer  03:10
It definitely looks that way from pretty much every perspective, 

Katie Dooley  03:14
Whereas...

Preston Meyer  03:15
The tricky thing is we don't have any sure day on when Moses is supposed to have been born.

Katie Dooley  03:19
Well, I mean, that's 4000 years ago, we're really starting to push it at that point. But Christianity has a standing JC 

Preston Meyer  03:27
Yeah. 

Katie Dooley  03:28
So that's, that's the starting point.

Preston Meyer  03:32
Yeah. Josh was later later, surnamed oily Josh was born approximately 2020 years ago. It's kind of convenient that we have a calendar that's based on the supposed time of his birth. Of course, there's loads of discussion on why that's not a very good estimation, why people think it's off.

Katie Dooley  03:56
Is it because we've changed our calendars? 

Preston Meyer  03:57
No, there's a good handful of scholars who are on one particular side of the argument say that Jesus was born probably four BC, four years earlier than what is typically commonly expected. This number is primarily driven by the chronology and the timing of the death of Herod the Great, the story of Matthew says that Herod the Great, was so worried about this rising up of the King of the Jews, that he had all the babies killed. And there's already some historical issues here. But for for that story to be true about Jesus, then Jesus had to have been born around four BC because Herod died a few years before one ad. So, which is the first year of our Lord It's not there's no year zero, it's not the year after the birth year before, it's year before and the year of 

Katie Dooley  05:06
A one and one. 

Preston Meyer  05:07
Yep. Calendars are tricky. There's usually not zero years and calendars. I'm not aware of a calendar that has a zero year. But I'm also allowing myself to get easily distracted from an interesting topic. So there's, I could go on for a whole hour on just the topic of the timing of when Jesus was born. I don't happen to believe that part of the story in the first few chapters of Matthew, that say anything about King Herod, popular Jewish literature of the time, attributes a very similar story to Abraham. And the way things go in Judaic literature is if you want somebody to look holy, or to appear to fill any of the same roles as another former great leader, you tell the exact same story about them. And so, as I think we talked about before, there's not a whole lot about the story of Jesus, that the first telling of that happening was to Jesus. This is definitely an example of that problem. Jesus, his story really begins with the important stuff when he was about 30 years old. Described as his cousin, good old John the Baptist, and then immediately starts teaching and beginning his life as a rabbi. And then tells everybody loads of things about how to be a good person, be a good neighbour, be a good friend. And then also says a few things that really offend an awful lot of people and gets killed.

Katie Dooley  06:47
Wow, yeah, short and sweet, 

Preston Meyer  06:50
Right? And so the Christian religion, when it exactly started, it's pretty easy to say, Jesus, having students as a rabbi in approximately 30 AD, is a fairly sound beginning. There's definitely a completely different organization at that point than there is 100 years later, or even 10 years later, let's be real. The churches established by the apostles are structurally very different and can't really be said to be the same church that Jesus started. But the doctrines and the dogma and the creeds and beliefs stem from the mortal ministry of Jesus and the miracles that He did to convince people that he was worth listening to. He fed an awful lot of people, whether they were rich or poor, he warns the rich that they're not going to go to heaven. This is very offensive to people in America who feel that you can't possibly have God's favor unless you are rich. It's a problem.

Katie Dooley  08:05
Well, I mean, there's a lot of wealthy churches out there. So that's probably a problem, too.

Preston Meyer  08:12
Yeah. Christianity is tricky. But yeah, it started with a guy. I don't think it's fair to just call him a guy who was in the Middle East, he was a Jew. He grew up in the Pharisaic tradition, he taught in the same way that all of the Pharisaic rabbis around him did. And this is very evident when reading the Bible. And if you have any familiarity with how the rabbis have argued, if you read the Talmud, or the Mishnah, in general, there's loads of arguing between people who have an education. It's almost like what we see today in university situations where you have to defend your thesis to be considered a doctor. Not wildly different. And that's that's who Jesus was as a mortal person was a person who argued on awful lot Well, we talked about this last episode that the Jewish community is waiting for the Messiah to come Christian believe the Messiah has come it was Jesus. Jesus is the Son of David that's going to rebuild the temple yeah and he didn't build anything as far as we have any record, 

Katie Dooley  09:28
Maybe a table. He was a carpenter, 

Preston Meyer  09:30
See, that's actually also a tricky thing. He might not- 

Katie Dooley  09:33
He didn't build a table!?

Preston Meyer  09:35
Though that is a very heartwarming scene and the Passion of the Christ seeing him build a table and having a high up being all prophetic that we're going to sit up here one day instead of these low tables where we're chilling out on our sides. This isn't even a visual medium, it doesn't matter.

Katie Dooley  09:50
Yeah, a person's like leaning and miming all of this just so everyone knows. He's really into it Yet, 

Preston Meyer  09:56
I talk with my hands and I draw things and one day well actually just straight up, have a show where people can see us. That'll be great. In the meantime, just miming for your entertainment. So there's there's no real evidence that Jesus was a carpenter at all. There's the word that has occasionally been translated as carpenter in the New Testament that's used to describe Jesus. And later in Latin, they doubled down and committed. Yeah, totally. Jesus was a carpenter. And that's where that tradition comes from. The Greek word translates more fairly to craftsman as a broader word. And if Jesus was, in fact, from the town that we now call Nazareth, it wasn't called Nazareth, when Jesus was born, according to all of the historians and archaeologists that we found, if he was from that town, it would make a lot more sense that he was actually a stone cutter. So slightly more likely that he would have actually built something that was meant to endure like a temple, but probably didn't build a temple.  right. Both just says the Jews are waiting for the Messiah to come, the Christians are waiting for him to come again. And the plan is that the temple will then be rebuilt.

Katie Dooley  10:45
I don't know what's with all this procrastination

Preston Meyer  11:27
Right? We just wait. We sit and wait, and we hope for the best. And some of us try not to be dicks in the meantime.

Katie Dooley  11:37
So the Christians had their Bible.

Preston Meyer  11:42
Oh, you're already on rocky ground.

Katie Dooley  11:45
Okay. We're going to do a full Bible episode so...

Preston Meyer  11:48
But I'll give a quick summary. So we talked before in the last episode that the Jews have the Tanakh, the Torah, the Nephi. And the Ketuvim. Christians have the Christian New Testament sometimes called the Greek Bible or the Greek New Testament. Luckily, the Catholic Church managed to nail down a solid 27 texts that make up the New Testament, and everybody splintered off after that point. So all Christians pretty much agree on the 27 books, the Bible, Luther wasn't too fond on the Epistle of James, there's loads of people who would like to write off the Revelation of John, but for the most part of the canon is those 27 texts. The Old Testament, which I've mentioned before, I like to call the Hebrew Bible, when it's appropriate, as much as I can remember to do so. The Old Testament is a different thing than the Hebrew Bible. Because the Hebrew Bible is 39 books. In the Christian tradition, the number is smaller, in, in the Hebrew tradition, they've combined a few books, they they've got a bunch of books got split in half, and they translated them into Greek, in the handful of centuries of the former era, the before Christ times. And so that the number got expanded a little bit, but also the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament, translated in Egypt, by a group, by Jews, who spoke Greek and could read and write it. They included a lot more books than are included in the newer Masoretic text of this of the Tanakh. And so the Orthodox Christians, Russians, Ukrainians that the Eastern Orthodox collection

Katie Dooley  13:50
There's also an Asian orthodox 

Preston Meyer  13:53
There is 

Katie Dooley  13:54
Which I don't know a lot about but I just thought it was important to mention that there's the Eastern European 

Preston Meyer  13:58
And then there's further Yeah,

Katie Dooley  14:00
Even further east 

Preston Meyer  14:02
There's so many different churches and blocks of churches within the umbrella of Christianity that there's there's not one thing that you can say about Christianity and their doctrines or their beliefs or their creeds. That is correct, if you want to make it universal, except for we believe in Jesus.

Katie Dooley  14:27
I, I think the only thing I remember hearing is that Jesus is the Son of God. 

Preston Meyer  14:33
Yes. 

Katie Dooley  14:34
Is what makes a Christian because then you get religious scholars who believe in a historical Jesus, that doesn't make them Christian, 

Preston Meyer  14:41
Right. 

Katie Dooley  14:41
So the lowest common denominator in Christianity is Jesus is the Son of God. And we'll dive into this at another point, but like, I'm a firm believer that if you think Jesus is the Son of God, you're a Christian even if you're Westboro Baptist Church, you have- 

Preston Meyer  15:01
Worst kind of Christian

Katie Dooley  15:02
-garbage doctrine. You are a Christian. And I, you know, and same thing for Islam. If you believe that Muhammad is the prophet, and you're a part of ISIS, then yeah, you're still a Muslim, you're a bad Muslim, but you're still a Muslim. And I think that's an important conversation to have in the world of moderation. And that some of these, these groups have to moderate themselves. If you think if you're a Christian, you think Westboro Baptist Church is bad. You need to be having those conversations in your congregation, or in your home and with your community, that you know, this. Yes, they're Christian, but this is not acceptable way to be anyway. Sorry, that was a little soapbox. I got I'm gonna step down now.

Preston Meyer  15:53
All right. It's okay, to have soapbox moments. This actually, that was really, really normal, say 200 years ago, for Christian preachers to actually jump up on a soapbox and shout at people. 

Katie Dooley  16:10
It's still kinda normal 

Preston Meyer  16:11
I mean, here. Sometimes when we go downtown, I definitely see dudes on soapbox is shouting at each other. And that's not the way Jesus taught at all. I mean, sometimes he had to lift his voice to be heard by what is reported to be huge numbers of people I feel like 5000 people listening to Jesus at any given time seems unrealistic. I feel like it's being artificially planted. Right? Well, even if you had, as was sometimes practice, a person speaking, and then people like, just at the cusp of hearing range, they would shout to the next people down, which would probably also be distracting to the dude in the middle, but also

Katie Dooley  16:57
Like, telephone, 

Preston Meyer  17:00
Right? It causes some serious problems, that things would be left out, things would be reworded in a way that can be very problematic. I mean, 2000 years of Christianity has shown us that pretty effectively. There's, there's a lot that distract from the what I wanted to say about the Bible. So there was this Bible that was produced by Jewish scholars in Egypt, putting the Bible into Greek, they included a lot more books than is included in the Mesorah. So the Greek Orthodox Church has them as part of the canon, the Septuagint includes a whole bunch of extra books, their Bible is longer. And the Catholics generally don't have it in the main text of their Bible, we have the word Apocrypha, primarily in our language today, because of the title of these books, as a group, also called Deutero-Canon, like it's in the canon, but it's second class kind of deal. So they're books that are recognized, but they're not authoritative. And some of them are nifty books. And some of them are really cool stories that like just as valid as other parts of the Bible, and so on, they're like, that's a good reason. You got that,

Katie Dooley  18:15
Just to backtrack a bit

Preston Meyer  18:18
I had to backtrack to get to the Bible thing.

Katie Dooley  18:20
Just like we're going in circles. Christianity has dozens, if not hundreds, of denominations, but I did want to let our congregants know that Christianity can be broken down into three big ones, which then break down further. So you have Orthodox Christianity, you have Catholicism, and then you have Protestantism, which we'll get into in more detail, but

Preston Meyer  18:45
You have smaller groups that don't really fit into those categories. But they're smaller groups. That's the way that goes.

Katie Dooley  18:51
Yeah. And so, chronologically, it sort of starts with orthodox and I feel like those started around the same time. Protestant- Protestantism is the newest one, and it comes out of Catholicism, which we'll get to but Preston's going to  jump in and correct me.

Preston Meyer  19:07
Yeah. So Christianity has never been properly united, even biblical, like the first decades of Christianity, Peter and Paul, who, for some reason, share a feast day, 

Katie Dooley  19:25
But they hate each other. 

Preston Meyer  19:26
I wouldn't say they hate each other. They disagreed on an awful lot on some pretty high-profile topics. 

Katie Dooley  19:33
Weren't they both there? 

Preston Meyer  19:35
Paul was, far as we know, never witnessed to anything that Jesus did while he was alive. But the story is that while he was off persecuting Christians for being terrible Jews, he was struck with a vision and went blind briefly, and saw Jesus say, stop being a dick. Here I Am become a Christian? And then he did. He quickly led 

Katie Dooley  20:05
I can't believe Jesus just called me a dick!

Preston Meyer  20:08
Right? Book of Mormon musical some good fun. And so Paul, after having seen Jesus went and hung out with the Christians and quickly led, rose to leadership, and wrote, basically half of the New Testament and famously disagreed with Peter on a bunch of things, called Peter out on being a bad Jew sometimes, when Peter was like, I'm not so worried about being a Jew. I'm a Christian. Peter has some struggles in his life, Paul has struggles in his 

Katie Dooley  20:45
Don't we all?

Preston Meyer  20:46
Right. And they did agree on a good handful of important things, but they're more famously celebrated for disagreeing. And there's loads of other factions in Christianity that became visible very quickly before the New Testament was done being written. You've got these groups who believe some some things that are condemned by the leadership of the church

Katie Dooley  21:09
Or the Gnostics, they believe some weird shit. 

Preston Meyer  21:13
So there's not one cohesive group of these are the Gnostics either, but Gnostic belief definitely crept into Christianity and caused some problems for a lot of people. And yeah, pretty decent example. And then, when all of the apostles were gone, mostly by being brutally murdered... 

Katie Dooley  21:34
Martyred, Preston 

Preston Meyer  21:36
Yes, martyred, they refuse to deny what they had taught, and that's the credit we get, we give them a slightly cooler title. There, they started using the word Catholic for the most broadly accepted tenets of the faith, Catholic meaning universal, and Orthodox as a word probably was used around then, realistically as a Greek word, which literally just means right teachings, the Catholic Church uses orthodoxy.

Katie Dooley  22:10
I remember why I think orthodoxy comes first, which is clearly now incorrect, but I always thought it came first because in the Orthodox tradition, so I think still in Ukrainian and Greek Orthodox, the mass is done with actual bread, and actual wine. And I believe they don't believe in Transubstantiation. So it's a metaphor that the bread is the body of Christ and the wine is the blood, whereas Catholics believe in Transubstantiation where it literally turns into the body, you're literally eating the flesh and blood, if you show up for mass, you're a cannibal. Yes. And I remember hearing a story is that the reason that Catholics use the Eucharist the cracker is because so when you break, bread crumbs are made. And if you're having mass in church, you know, there could be birds or rats or church mice and they're obviously picking up the crumbs and the Catholics think it's like sacrilegious for a mouse to have the body of Christ in him. So that's why in my brain, I was like, well, the bread and wine would have come first and then it innovated into the, the Eucharist cracker

Preston Meyer  23:29
I hadn't heard that, but it does make sense in that context.

Katie Dooley  23:33
So that's why in my brain orthodoxy came first because they didn't give a shit and then they got stricter. But that was my reasoning. Why I said what I said, I said what I said, but thank you for correcting me. Fun fact for for for you.

Preston Meyer  23:49
Yeah. So orthodoxy and Catholicism, weren't really titles that were used a whole lot, until maybe a little less than 1000 years ago, at Catholic would have been used more than orthodox as describing the church, which would have been the Christian church until the big split of going from memory, I'm going to say 1134 AD. And I really hope I remembered that right. It feels like I studied pretty hard? I don't like focusing on dates because trying to. I don't think you guys care.

Katie Dooley  24:28
It was a long time ago. 

Preston Meyer  24:29
Yeah about 1000 years ago, there was this huge split, but between a whole bunch of Christians and the split, mostly ended up being the leadership of East versus the leadership of West. Ultimately, down to a word, one word in Latin. And an awful lot of argument about that word, because the big split, and that word is based on my pronunciation of Latin which people can argue but can't prove anything is filioque which is "and the Son", which out of context is meaningless. But we're really talking about the Holy Ghost in the Trinitarian godhead, that is the God of Christianity. The Holy Ghost is said to come from the Father, and those in the West added, and the Son. And the folks out east are like, No, that's not a cool, that's not right. We don't believe that, and you can't make us at it. And if you want to start a fight over it, bye. 

Katie Dooley  25:42
Bye, Felicia. 

Preston Meyer  25:43
And so the guys on the east side and the west side just excommunicated each other, and said we're splitting the church up and 

Katie Dooley  25:52
That's not the first time it's gonna happen. Spoiler alert!

Preston Meyer  25:56
So many similar things have happened over and over again. It's, it's interesting, like we talked about in Judaism, that there's the major groups within Christian within Judaism that we look at our, you know, the Orthodox, Conservative and Liberal, where it's not wildly different beliefs, they just sort of level of this level of practice. Most mostly, 

Katie Dooley  26:24
I mean, not fair either really. 

Preston Meyer  26:26
Yeah. Because every every discussion on theology is different from Rabbi to Rabbi anyway, even within the Liberals within the Orthodox within any given group, which is nice that you can actually have those discussions, it's so much easier to talk religion to a Jew than to a Christian. In Christianity, there's huge fights over almost every single point of doctrine. And in an awful lot of those instances, new church pops up. That gets really frustrating. So we had that huge split after a decent universality of Christianity for many centuries. And then we went a few 100 years more without any really big splits. And then in the 1500s, things got really messy, really, really fast. Europe started falling apart and splintering really bad. As far as Christianity goes, we have reformers like Martin Luther, who's like, you guys have a lot of issues. I noticed this one thing I spent a lot of time studying. Here's a list of 95 things you guys need to get figured out and change.

Katie Dooley  27:44
And there was a time there was like three Popes. Then there is a division and...

Preston Meyer  27:48
It was definitely always been questioning authority. That hasn't been too big of a problem. I mean, it definitely causes issues that I want to talk about a little bit later on. After I deal with the split. Yeah, Martin Luther. If you know much about him, you're either a fan or you're not. And that's fine. He put a lot of work into trying to make the church better. And that itself sounds pretty laudable. And there's actually a pretty decent movie up telling this story, starring Joseph Fiennes how you pronounce his name. I really enjoy the movie. It's got a bunch of other big stars in it. It's a lot of fun. A little bit of a downer, but it ends on a nice note. I've been told that Martin never left the Catholic Church. But

Katie Dooley  28:43
I thought he was considered a heretic.

Preston Meyer  28:47
He was definitely like going to trials all the time for excommunication. Like, don't cut me off from the church. But that's different than leaving the church. His relationship with the church was rocky from actually pretty much the beginning of him teaching at the university, and then only got worse as he started teaching against things that the Pope was doing. causing problems. That's the thing. A similar sort of thing about the same century, England had a fundamental issue with King Henry, who really just

Katie Dooley  29:31
Wanted to fuck a lot of women.

Preston Meyer  29:34

I mean, it's easy to say that that's what the problem was. 

Katie Dooley  29:37
He was king so he didn't need to. 

Preston Meyer  29:38
Well, okay, he was king. You have an awful lot of power is king. He also had an impotency problem. So and that's not published nearly enough.

Katie Dooley  29:50
Like, I've read quite a bit on King Henry.

Preston Meyer  29:52
Yeah, like he killed a couple of his wives. He divorced a couple of his wives,

Katie Dooley  29:58
Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded survived, right?

Preston Meyer  30:04
It's very nice. It's poetic. Actually, George Carlin does a great bit on Henry the Eighth too. But that's not the point.

Katie Dooley  30:12
He wanted to divorce Katherine of  Aragon and he couldn't because he was Catholic

Preston Meyer  30:19
And right Pope said, That's not okay. And the kings like, you guys are in Italy. I'm in England. I'm gonna do what I want.

Katie Dooley  30:26
I got divine right from God, right. God says I can start my own religion.

Preston Meyer  30:32
And ever since that time sharing today, the Church of England has been a thing. And most of the time the monarch is looked at as the, the authoritative head of the church, though not actually the ecclesiastical leader of the church. That's the Archbishop of Canterbury. Yeah.

Katie Dooley  30:52
And there I mean, it flipped flopped a little bit after Henry the Eighth backwards, Catholic, but now, I mean, Queen Elizabeth is still Church of England.

Preston Meyer  31:01
Yeah, that was actually one of the issues that a lot of people have with Charles taking over his king is that he married a Catholic after his wife died. Yeah. And there's a lot of people who are super uncomfortable with him being the head of the Church of England, having married a Catholic, and a lot of people like, well, let's just, let's send it straight to William. Okay. Awesome. Does it solve the problem? It did?

Katie Dooley  31:29
I mean, I would argue that William is probably a lot like most US presidents and is a part of the Church of England I'm doing air quotes

Preston Meyer  31:39
I can see what's great and high level of certainty that William has been to church a lot more than Donald. How much he believes I have no idea. I've not talked to him on the subject. But

Katie Dooley  31:52
Do you want to do our podcast Prince William, please,

Preston Meyer  31:55
We would be very honoured. Yeah, all right. So Luther Henry, once they both successfully started their own churches, more or less. I don't want to say Luther started at church, but he definitely started a church. He started his efforts from Catholicism, his efforts led to what we know today is the Lutheran Church, which, if you're looking at how to deal with your neighbour, who was Lutheran, Lutheran is basically Catholic light. It's, it's not wildly different. It's just pretty different on a lot of little things. But

Katie Dooley  32:40
Now my understanding of Martin Luther his biggest complaints, concerns with the church is that the priests were the gatekeepers to religion, you needed a priest to have any sort of chance of going to heaven. And everything was still done in Latin, which very few people spoke and I remember hearing that some of the priests didn't even speak Latin, and they just kind of go fettuccine bikini.

Preston Meyer  33:08
Yeah. If they couldn't remember exactly what to say, or they didn't have the text to read the script. Yeah, they would just spout nonsense.

Katie Dooley  33:17
And it was all about getting religion in the hands of the people, which, yeah, if you're going to do it anyway. That's I'm gonna agree with that, I think empowering people...

Preston Meyer  33:28
Another 400 years for the Catholic Church to be like, maybe we should do it in the vernacular. Vatican two is when we finally got English as a standard thing.

Katie Dooley  33:41
And that I mean, that killed Latin as a language. Nobody speaks it now

Preston Meyer  33:45
Right? Honestly, we're going through getting my bachelor's degree, I had to have language credits. And I had so many people like you're going to study Latin? No, I have no reason to study Latin was so previously that I had been working as a translator for the Bible. And they're like, Well, you work with the Bible. So you need Latin? No. Why would I want to read the Bible in Latin, that separates myself further from the original text, the original language, it was a problem. It's annoying. The New Testament was written all originally in Greek. With potentially that not being true with Matthew, an awful lot of people believe that the Gospel of Matthew was originally written in Hebrew or Aramaic, I guess, and then translated into Greek, but there's no evidence for that,

Katie Dooley  34:34
Because I can see the argument, which we'll talk about in our Bible episode is things getting lost in translation, which is why absolutely you can get the Quran in different languages, but it will, services are always done in Arabic because that's the language of the Quran. So you can see had it originally been written in Latin that that was their argument, but

Preston Meyer  34:55
The liturgy definitely would have been originally written in Latin, but that's it. I guess the papal bowls and whatnot. The ecclesiastical discourse would have happened in in Latin an awful lot of the time, but probably not exclusively. So, in England, they wanted the Bible in English, St. Thomas Moore, who was sainted, which aggravates me because the big thing that he did was kill people and burn books. Just because these people wanted the Bible published in English. He was sainted. The Catholic Church has not rescinded this. I don't think they've ever rescinded a sainthood. I could be wrong. I've honestly not looked it up. But I think that only just came to mind. But same thing, St. Thomas Moore is a thing I'm uncomfortable with. There's actually a lot of saints I'm uncomfortable with and we will definitely just talk about that for a whole episode one of these days, but not quite yet. And so what the the success of these two groups creating their own churches or movements in Europe, and the Pope really proving powerless against them. You got a whole bunch more people, Holland, and Germany and Scotland and pretty much all over Europe, people were or Western Europe, at least English or English. Eastern Europe didn't really do it so much. But Western Europe really started up a whole bunch of new movements, some of which are fairly termed Protestant. And some of them feel a little separate in in the way that they came to be from that label. Anabaptist are really cool. 

Katie Dooley  36:44
I was gonna say Mennonites, and Hutterites, which are part of the Anabaptist umbrella are very interesting denominations that originated in Europe and are now very popular. I think they're almost exclusively in North America. I know they had some from your persecution, which is why they came to North America. But yeah, that is one that seems very, I mean, to this day, very separate from mainstream Christianity.

Preston Meyer  37:12
I believe Mennonites are actually becoming more and more popular, right, like growing rapidly in Mexico right now. Which is pretty nifty.

Katie Dooley  37:21
I have a note here that I would like, you know, I wrote the notes on this. But there's a lot of words I want you to explain to me. So it's the big issue in Christianity is the question of ecclesiastical authority. First of all, what is ecclesiastical authority?

Preston Meyer  37:41
But I want to say it's complicated. It's not that complicated. Ecclesiastic authority is who has the power to make decisions and guide the church. And what that authority looks like is also in question in the Orthodox tradition, and

Katie Dooley  38:01
I have Catholics, most Orthodox and Latter-Day Saints are apostolic. So what is apostolic? 

Preston Meyer  38:15
For example, I worked for an Egyptian family right out of high school that I absolutely loved. And I learned from them that the church in Egypt, the Egyptian Orthodox Church, was basically founded by St. Mark, the dude who wrote the Gospel of Mark, travelled to Egypt as a missionary establish the church, as an apostle of the church. And that and they just, they hold on to that authority from descended from every successor, who held the basically the bishopric over that territory. And that's the same for an awful lot of jurisdictions out in the east, is an apostle setup camp, sent out missionaries from his camp, and basically established the church. And Rome is the same way, with Peter being the first bishop of Rome, and then Linus following. The idea is that these bishops in a way that nobody's willing to explain in a way that satisfies me hold apostolic authority over that city, even though they've not actually been made apostles by their predecessors. And so there's that line of authority that lots of people like to say is unbroken, because they can draw you a line through names. Yay, being able to write your own history as being the person in power.

Katie Dooley  39:47
Sounds like it's a lot like the history with the British Crown,

Preston Meyer  39:53
Right where you can trace through the British Crown into the genealogies recorded in the Bible, that sounds sketchy.

Katie Dooley  40:02
But like, yeah, absolutely you can draw a line. But there at some point there are different families and political marriages and Elizabeth didn't have Elizabeth the first didn't have kids. So she appointed someone new and wars. Yeah. So that's, that's what this sounds like, to me where yes, you could draw a line, but it's not necessary. Yeah, that's not necessarily unbroken. It's there's a lot of shenanigans in there.

Preston Meyer  40:27
Right? Well, like, as you mentioned, the time when we had three Pope's reigning at the same time, each fighting over the bishopric of Rome. That's not an unbroken line that's slightly bubbly, and funky, and unpleasant and historically confusing sometimes. And so, there's that idea of authority being received all the way through this line from the apostles. And so that is claimed by most orthodox denominations that I'm aware of the Catholic Church, and Mormonism. Mormonism doesn't do it the same way as the Catholics and Orthodox. Well, there's the modern Apostles in fulfill us a slightly different role than Catholic and Orthodox apostles. And also, there's a different narrative that there's not an unbroken 2000 years of history. It's in the 1820. I'm blanking on the air. So in the 1820s, Joseph Smith reported that he had Peter, James and John appeared to him and ordained him as an elder and an apostle for the Restoration of the gospel. And so we don't have a full 2000 year history for Latter Day Saints apostolic authority, we've got 200 years, which is rejected by an awful lot of Christians around the world, like the vast majority. And then there's the Protestants, who really think is interesting. The Anglican Church pulls no punches, they will flat out call the church of Rome apostate. Not all of them, obviously. But in plenty of official documents, that is the wording that is used. And that's problematic when you all of your authority is derived from that heritage. You can't say that your authority is good when you denounce the source of it. It's tricky. It's very tricky. And Lutheranism is similar, but not quite the same. And then you've got your your evangelicals who don't worry about authority at all.

Katie Dooley  43:01
Whoever wants to be the next, Billy Graham, yeah, can be the next Billy Graham. Yeah,

Preston Meyer  43:07
It's that easy and terrifying.

Katie Dooley  43:11
I mean, it's, this is gonna sound crazy coming from a Katie, but kind of falls into what Martin Luther it's in the hands of the people like why can't an average person and arguably Jesus was an average person become something great. Great. And that's how the Vatican pick their saints is that these people show some higher level of religiosity that is worthy of being made a saint. So why, yeah, why? Why do you need a if you preach a good, message, why do you need authority?

Preston Meyer  43:56
So different churches use that authority differently. Even the Catholic Church who claims and authority on their claims a monopoly on salvific authority. As long as you believe in Jesus, you can perform a baptism, an Anglican can perform a baptism and the Catholic Church generally will say, Yep, I could baptize now. And they're good. They reject baptisms from a handful of churches, that they're not comfortable with their theology. Catholics reject all authority claimed by Mormons for their baptisms. The wording on that is a little bit weird and fuzzy on why that's the case. And being able to defend that position when, you know, literally, anybody claiming an Anglican or Lutheran or Episcopalian, or Baptist faith can baptize on the Catholic Church says, Yeah, that's cool. It's just a little bit weird to me. Whereas the Mormon Church, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, you. You've got a very specifically delineated character of authority on who can baptize somebody. And it's cut and dry, it's easy to follow. But it's also a lot narrower than other groups. Then you've got the common evangelical position where a baptism isn't performed by somebody, you, you go into the water, you come out and no one has to touch you - parroting a lot of what we see in Judaism with the mikvah. You go into water, you come out, you're good. That's the deal. Whereas, biblically, the baptisms that we see in the Bible, we have John the Baptist, a person with authority, baptizing another person. So that's authority is a tricky thing. What that authority does, sometimes that authority is just the authority to teach and to lead. Sometimes it's who can perform these sacraments or ordinances. And it's kind of weird, Jehovah's Witnesses, their notion of, of authority, as far as it relates to the priesthood is baffling to me. I've asked, and I've not gotten an answer that makes sense to me enough to satisfy my question that Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and Latter Day Saints claim authority by ordination from somebody who has got authority before them, the chain. Jehovah's Witnesses claim authority to perform Christian rights by virtue of having a Bible. Which is problematic to me. I haven't been able to make sense of it. I haven't had anybody explain it to me in a way that has made sense to me. I don't really, I can't defend it, because I don't understand it. It's just just one of those things that is odd.

Katie Dooley  47:32
So we've talked a lot about differences.

Preston Meyer  47:41
We've talked about the one thing that binds them all together.

Katie Dooley  47:44
Yeah. And how they split and split and split and split. Yes, there's one thing that binds them all, David, but there are more similarities. If they're not entirely universal, there are some things that are quite common. First one I think of is Sunday as the Sabbath.

Preston Meyer  48:06
Not universal

Katie Dooley  48:07
No, I know. That's because the Seventh Day Adventist is the first one I think, but near all of these are near-universal, because the only thing that's universal is Jesus is the son of God. But this would be very short episode, if we just said, Jesus Christ, and we believe he's the son of God. And that's how Christian started. And that's the overarching.

Preston Meyer  48:31
There's actually a little detail in there. That's not universal. Jehovah's Witnesses straight up, deny a cross.

Katie Dooley  48:38
Oh and I forgot that one too I've heard that one too. There's one where he was on just like a post, right? 

Preston Meyer  48:45
It's so complicated, Katie!

Katie Dooley  48:48
And here we are trying to give an overarching groundwork

Preston Meyer  48:53
We just we need some sort of foundation to move forward with our later discussions.

Katie Dooley  48:58
But this one's this one I think is the hardest one because there's just so much variance. All these next points are near universal. So don't be emailing me saying "but we don't believe in this" 'Cause we know we know. So Sabbath near universal on Sundays. And that is, that's because God rested. No. That's Judaism. Yeah, that's because Jesus was resurrected on

Preston Meyer  49:33
Jesus was Jesus rose from the dead.

Katie Dooley  49:39
That's because Jesus was resurrected on a Sunday.

Preston Meyer  49:42
Yep. So it's the Lord's day. There's actually plenty of churches that they'll have their sign up on the front of the building, and to let you know, when they're when their mass is or their meetings, as that's pretty standard detail, but a lot of them will actually say we meet on the Lord's Day, which isn't ever confusing to the people who go there, but it can be confusing to people from outside that group.

Katie Dooley  50:14
And how the Sabbath is recognized is different. I imagine it's everything from similar to Judaism where you don't do anything at all. Typically, people go to church for North America often you go for lunch afterwards. 

Preston Meyer  50:33
Gotta get that Chick-Fil-A 

Katie Dooley  50:36
after but, you know, some people work all day Sunday.

Preston Meyer  50:41
There's no Chick-Fil-A on Sundays, it's okay.

Katie Dooley  50:46
So, how the Sabbath is recognized is different, but typically it's the church day. Unless you're a Seventh Day Adventist, in which case that's Saturday.

Preston Meyer  50:57
There's there's a bunch of Christians who have retained the ancient Sabbath rather than the renewed Sabbath.

Katie Dooley  51:08
Communion, or mass. 

Preston Meyer  51:13
The emblems of the bread and the wine. 

Katie Dooley  51:15
Mostly universal

Preston Meyer  51:16
Mostly universal. I've not - I can't think of any off the top of my head that don't. It is specifically said in the Bible, you should be doing this. And I don't think I can think of

Katie Dooley  51:27
I've been to church services where it hasn't happened. But I don't know if that was because it was it's a separate service or whatever. But I have gone to just like a regular Saturday Protestant service that didn't but again, I don't know if that. 

Preston Meyer  51:43
Yeah, there's, there's loads of churches who don't do it every Sunday. There's, there's some who, even if they have several meetings over the course of the week, they'll only do it on Sunday. Or, or Saturday, if that's their day. Jehovah's Witnesses, if I remember correctly, only do this the Eucharist on the Passover. So if it's once a year, you've got the Latter Day Saints who will do it most Sundays, but they'll usually skip four or five Sundays in the year. 

Katie Dooley  52:16
And they wouldn't do it with wine. 

Preston Meyer  52:17
Right? They'll use water instead, in almost every case.

Katie Dooley  52:21
Do you maybe you want to talk about what the communion is like what I mean? I don't want to assume anyone knows that it's the body and blood of Christ

Preston Meyer  52:31
Yeah, it's it's not just a thing that showed up in the New Testament, it's a carryover from an older set of sacrifices. When you brought your lamb to be sacrificed at the altar at the temple, there was very often sacrifices accompanying that of bread and wine, and the little bit of wine would typically be poured out into the ground, as we see in a lot of religions around the world. And then it would be shared among those who are participating as well. And so Jesus said, my blood is the wine spilt for man. And because Jesus, of course, in Christianity is that great final blood sacrifice, and then the bread, which was broken apart and offered for the good of humanity, is that body of Christ, again, sacrificed all that. And so that tradition is perpetuated throughout Christianity for the last 2000 years, to remember that sacrifice that Jesus made. And so it's one of the handful of things that are pretty much universal among Christians, even if it's not every Sunday or Saturday for everybody.

Katie Dooley  53:48
The other one I have and again, I can't think of an exception is baptism seems pretty common again, the way it's done vary, but I can't think of a denomination that doesn't encourage baptism.

Preston Meyer  54:08
The Bible is pretty clear, in a few instances that Jesus tells the people go out baptizing the people. So if you're a Christian preacher who's not telling people that they should be baptized, that would be very irregular, because it doesn't mesh with what is taught in the book that you're teaching from.

Katie Dooley  54:29
The baptism can be done for infants.

Preston Meyer  54:33
That's pretty standard for the Catholic and Orthodox faiths.

Katie Dooley  54:37
And then the other one you see often it's about 11 years old. And that is so that the young person understands what the, the gravitas of a baptism is, and that they understand the commitments that they're making.

Preston Meyer  54:54
Absolutely. Oh, yeah. Anabaptists tend to be around puberty age. Latter-Day Saints typically do it at eight. There's, I'm sure there's other traditions where it's it's got another obscure specific age. There's plenty of churches who just say when you're an adult.

Katie Dooley  55:13
Yeah, when you're ready. And then Catholics also have they have a celebration at 11, your first very first communion, affirmation and confirmation, and that's, I mean, it's not a baptism you would've been my baptized, but that is sort of that was like the double whammy where you have to like, that's where you and then you're really committed you're really committed and you understand the gravity of this choice you're making to be confirmed.

Preston Meyer  55:43
Yeah, for Latter-Day Saints, the tradition that I'm pretty familiar with from a first-person point of view, that first communion is typically like a day after the baptism. And it's not really such a big deal as the baptism itself. But just one denominations experience.

Katie Dooley  56:03
The the actually I don't I, I think most Christians believe in the Second Coming.

Preston Meyer  56:12
I think, as I know, that's universal

Katie Dooley  56:17
The idea is that Jesus was crucified, he's gonna come back, restore the temple. Last Judgment. And yeah, so he'll decide where we get to go. It'll be hell on earth, according to Revelations.

Preston Meyer  56:35
Yes, the Revelation of John, not revelations. There's no s on the title. There's far too many Christians who get it wrong. I certainly can't blame you for not getting it right

Katie Dooley  56:46
I've only ever heard revelations.

Preston Meyer  56:49
But remember how I said an awful lot of Christians don't open the book? Yeah, that's where that problem comes from. And, yeah, in the Revelation of John, it warns us that the world is going going to get an awful lot worse before it gets better. Which is pretty typical of apocalyptic literature of the era.

Katie Dooley  57:11
Perfect. So we have a second coming. And then I guess, with that, again most Christians believe in some form of heaven. And most Christians believe in some form of hell. So there's variants and that's all it's debated how you get to either one of them. But they do, I guess that is our Yeah, that's an afterlife. And that's how you keep people in line.

Preston Meyer  57:42
Yeah, that's ultimately how it's been used for all of recorded history is striking fear into people's hearts to control them, which is not a characteristic of love, which is kind of the primary doctrine of Christ is to love one another. So, yay for disconnects within your logic and reasoning.

Katie Dooley  58:09
So here's a question for you. Since we have a resident Christian, how do you, this could be you personally, or the universal you decide what you believe when there's so much variation. And as an outsider, it really feels like you could just cherry-pick to...

Preston Meyer  58:32
Absolutely. I don't think that choosing what you believe is really the way it works. You can receive information, and then you either believe it or you don't. And that has a lot to do with how it meshes with information you've already had up to that point. Definitely, the burden of proof is ever-present. And something's what counts as evidence. What counts as evidence changes sometimes, depending on context, is the word proof is actually kind of weird. There's no such thing as proof in any context other than mathematics. Everything else is evidence.

Katie Dooley  59:17
Interesting. Maybe the question maybe it's not choosing what you believe. I don't I don't know how to frame this. But if you can find it doesn't matter what you believe you'll find it didn't I guess? Yeah. Doesn't matter what you believe you'll find a denomination of Christianity that jives with it.

Preston Meyer  59:37
Yeah, at the very least you'll find a denomination of Christianity that's going to let you not change.

Katie Dooley  59:44
And isn't that a problem?

Preston Meyer  59:50
Yes, from the Christian perspective of there is one faith, one God one baptism. That's the mantra Having such a diversity of gods that you have sculpted in your own image is a huge problem. It's a complicated problem. And the trick is that you can't just convince somebody that the God that they've made up for themselves isn't real.

Katie Dooley  1:00:19
Oh, yeah, absolutely. Because if you could, then we wouldn't be a registered religion. Fun times. This is a complicated topic. Do we have a nice summary for for our listeners?

Preston Meyer  1:00:44
I want to summarize what Christianity is supposed to be, as presented in the Bible that all of these Christians are supposed to be reading and teaching out of. That there is good news. That's where the word gospel comes from, is that there is good news. The good news is that because Jesus died for us, we can change and have that change actually affect our outcomes after this life. It doesn't matter what I've done in the past, that doesn't make it impossible for me to actually have happiness in the next life. As long as I've changed and become better, change is meaningful change is possible. And because of that, we need to encourage people to be their best selves, by loving them, not by forcing them to suffer under our burdens of abuse and punishment for being different. There's, there's an awful lot of hope in the biblical Christian message. And that's true for an awful lot of religions. That there's a reason to be good, that all of the bad things that have happened around you or happen to you or happen because of you can be made to matter less, which is pretty cool. Yeah. But honestly, when you look at the way Christians behave towards each other, that's really easily lost.

Katie Dooley  1:02:30
Yeah, and toward others,

Preston Meyer  1:02:34
especially towards others, that I can't decide which is more unnerving. The way Christians treat people of other faiths or the way they treat each other. But it's all bad. It's all disappointing.

Katie Dooley  1:02:49
Yeah. It's definitely a problem. And I think there needs to be some more self-policing, in I mean, probably all religions, but

Preston Meyer  1:03:03
definitely all religions. Because it's a human problem. It's not a religious problem. It's yeah, we are weak and frail. And we're, we get self-conscious, and we need to protect ourselves. So we suck.

Katie Dooley  1:03:16
I think where I struggle on this isn't really a point on Christianity necessarily. But as an atheist, it's when people behave holier than thou because of their religion. And then you're actually not. And I think, yeah, that is a barrier to correction or moderation or what have you. I mean, move forward popped up, or having a conversation about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, or acting holier than now. And the rules don't apply to you. All of a sudden, it's like, there's sex abuse in the Catholic Church, it's still an issue and it shouldn't be like they should all be in jail. Like, I don't understand.

Preston Meyer  1:04:07
It's frustrating. It's deeply uncomfortable for most people to talk about, but it's a real thing. And the problem is not being fixed.

Katie Dooley  1:04:16
Yeah. And I Yeah, so I guess I think sometimes religion is a hindrance to having those conversations

Preston Meyer  1:04:27
very often it is so

Katie Dooley  1:04:30
Anyway, on that Debbie downer, of a note. Jesus loves you.

Preston Meyer  1:04:39
Yeah. Oh, actually, I just remembered, is slightly more positive. Which I think is maybe why it came to mind. There's a wonderful quote by Nietzsche, that God is dead. And loads of people love to just end the quote there. Which is a fun way to say all these philosophers are the worst because they just are done with God. There's more to that, quote. God is dead, and we have killed him. And how can we be forgiven? It's it's kind of a weird question. And, of course, he grew up in a Christian community where he is aware that Jesus died. And the story is that he came back and isn't vengeful, which is pretty cool.

Katie Dooley  1:05:48
I mean it's nice of him

Preston Meyer  1:05:50
I mean, so many of the other gods that we've heard of in our histories definitely would have come back bearing a sword. Right,

Katie Dooley  1:05:59
Or a lightning bolt in the form of a swan

Preston Meyer  1:06:04
in the form of a swan or in the form of swan's dick good old Zeus. Well, that's our episode on Christianity

Both Hosts  1:06:17
Peace be with you!

We are spending the next 7 episodes giving overviews of the world's most popular religious traditions. We're starting with the oldest persistent Abrahamic tradition: Judaism. Join us as we discuss religious texts, practices, observances, and more!

No religion is monolithic, but there are some things that bind together the Jewish faith, like the Hebrew Bible. While we don’t know who wrote the Hebrew Bible, some people believe Moses wrote the five books himself.

In this episode, we talk about the Exodus--the exciting story of Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt. We also discuss the story of King David, his childhood battle with Goliath his prophesized son that will rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.

Judaism uses the Tanakh: a group of writings to guide their worship. This includes the Torah (the 5 books of Moses), the Nevi’im (works of the Prophets) and the Ketuvim (the Writings). One thing that makes the Jewish community unique is that they are encouraged to argue and debate their scripture, which is where we get some of these writings from.

There are three main branches of Judaism: Orthodox, Conservative and Reform. We explain the differences in observances between these groups.

The Jews are also known for dietary restrictions, circumcisions, deep-fried food, and taking it really easy on Saturdays. We explain all this and more on this episode of the Holy Watermelon Podcast.

Support us at Patreon and Spreadshirt

Join the Community on Discord

Learn more great religion facts on Facebook and Instagram

***

Katie Dooley  00:12

Hello, everyone,

Preston Meyer  00:13

and welcome to the holy watermelon od test.

Katie Dooley  00:16

My name is Katie Preston. And what are we talking about? We have a new series Happy New Year 21 Let's hope it's better for everyone, then 2020 We have a new series, I get series mini series started, guess

Preston Meyer  00:35

what we're doing, we're gonna take a dive, not a super deep dive, because there's an awful lot of depth to every religion, but we're going to take a reasonably deep dive into the biggest of the world religions. And then maybe we'll take a look at some of the smaller ones later, too. So we're gonna start with Judaism. Cool.

Katie Dooley  00:56

So tonight, yeah, today we're talking about today's because it's the first chronologically an Abrahamic religion. So it seems like a good place to start.

Preston Meyer  01:11

Yeah, it's like most religions, it's kind of tricky. It's not monolithic. There's not a pope who's in charge of all of the Jews, for example. But there's one unifying detail that they all adhere to some degree or another, to the Hebrew Bible, and the Jewish tradition of the good old Holy Land.

Katie Dooley  01:36

So let's start with how it started. Some of the I guess, I guess it starts with Exodus. And maybe you want to talk about this briefly, in brief the story of Exodus, and I don't know what you know about who wrote that story. Now,

Preston Meyer  01:56

I don't think anybody knows who wrote that story down. There's an awful lot of people who genuinely believe that Moses wrote, all five of the books ascribed to him in the old testament to the Hebrew Bible. But there's also a handful of clues in there that say that was written much later. That's not to say that Moses couldn't have written down some of it. But there's not a whole lot of evidence for that either. It's a large collection of books, the the Exodus, which is probably the second most read of the Five Books of Moses, because nobody reads Leviticus, or Deuteronomy, or numbers, the names are intimidating, and the content is incredibly dry. But Exodus is the exciting story of Moses, leading the Israelites out of Egypt. And of course, Genesis tells the story of how the nation the people of Israel came to be. So those two books get an awful lot of credit, and the other three are forgotten. And so the Exodus, the foundational story of who Israelites are, as a freed people, is hugely important to their identity. It's about Moses being born into slavery, and then being thrown into a river in a handy dandy boat so he doesn't drown and sink, which is super important. If you want a nation to survive.

Katie Dooley  03:26

You can buy it's Moses baskets for your kids that are called Moses pass. Of course. I don't know what convenience they are.

Preston Meyer  03:35

They're not. I don't recommend trying to use them in that way. though. I haven't looked at them.

Katie Dooley  03:44

Why would you carry your kid like that? I don't know. It's kind of weird. Like, they're not safe like a car seat. Right? Comfortable like a bassinet. I don't know why you would want one. But then you go fun facts the world you can buy a moses basket for your baby. Yeah.

Preston Meyer  03:57

And so the story that we have an exodus of that transference from one family to another is reminiscent a lot of the story of Noah and the ark. One of the stories probably influenced the way the other was told at least a little bit, because storytelling just is subject to that feature. And then Moses grows up in the royal court in Egypt, and at age 40, after probably having been married and initiated into the Egyptian cults and whatnot. He kills a dude for being super rude to some Israelite slaves, and realizes, Oh, crap, this is a crime because they actually had decent laws protecting their slaves. But also, you can't kill another Egyptian, especially when he's not a slave.

Katie Dooley  04:50

I mean, that rule still applies, I think.

Preston Meyer  04:53

I think mostly, I mean, the world's getting weirder. But generally don't kill Egypt. Yeah, we're at war or your own countrymen. In Canada, if you kill a foreign national, about half of our country is probably going to cheer you on. Things are kind of weird. But a Canadian citizen is a big no no for the murder in Canada. So Moses flees off into the wilderness at age 40, leaving his family behind. He most certainly had wife and children at that age, being a prince in the royal court at 40. And single would have been unheard of. And takes off, finds his new family Midianite priest offers his daughter to be Moses new wife, and Moses starts a new family lives with them for 40 years did

Katie Dooley  05:47

he leave for a pack of smokes and never come back?

Preston Meyer  05:53

I don't think he had time to give the pack of smokes excuse to the kids. He just disappeared. Of course. I mean, he could have been on literally any errand when he was catching this Egyptian beating Hebrew in the streets. And yeah, any excuse could have been given at that time, I guess. And then after 40 years in the desert with this Midianite family Midianites are also descendants of Abraham. So they're like, cousin ish, because we're not really very many generic, very many generations from Abraham, with Moses himself. So reasonably distant cousin, but close enough that you totally would have shot to the same family reunion if that was a thing.

Katie Dooley  06:42

3000 year old family we

Preston Meyer  06:45

probably older 4000 3000 years ago, well, three and a half, maybe. I mean, archaeology is kind of rough on this one on the exact dating of it. And so at age 80, Moses is like, just doing his business taking care of the flocks. Also, his father in law is still around. So that's kind of cool. People have to be really old in these Bible stories, right? Honestly, the number 80 It's kind of sketchy. 30 I mean, we don't know for sure. They say he was 40 when he left Egypt, that he probably wasn't younger than 30 to get a number like 40. But we keep stacking for two years and 40 years and 40 years for Moses. It's kind of suspect. But I mean, we're

Katie Dooley  07:35

straight up don't know this. This might be a completely where we still tracking time, like we do now. Yeah, pretty much. So there's still 12 months in a year and 30 days in a month and 24 hours in a day.

Preston Meyer  07:47

24 hours in a day. I think there's a Babylonian thing if I remember correctly, cuz I know we have. That's 30 July and August because of Julius and Augustus. Yeah.

Katie Dooley  07:59

Remember, though, that

Preston Meyer  08:00

the Roman calendar was 10 months for a long time. The Israelites were pretty committed to a 12 month calendar that occasionally threw in the 13th month, rather than a leap day like we have to adjust the calendar they added just a whole month. Because every month, you couldn't tell. Yeah, it was kind of weird. I'm

Katie Dooley  08:21

just curious if that's why they got so bold in the Bible is because the year was only six months,

Preston Meyer  08:27

they definitely would have had some serious problems with the harvest scheduling and make sacrifices that went with those if they shifted through the year too much. So that the years were still more or less years, and sometimes they were a little bit shorter. Sometimes they're a little longer to counteract the shorter ones. And so at Moses dealing with the sheep sees this fire up in the mountain. And like that, that bush is on fire. But as it gets closer, he realizes it's not burning away. The narrative there seems a little bit weird to me, like fires happen. Maybe he was worried about a camper or somebody who is like squatting. I don't know. Either way, he goes up in the mountains uses burning bush, and then talks to God is the story. And then it's okay. I mean, there's not a whole lot of concrete proof to say that they he was of sound mind at the time, in fact, or Karen was the name of the movie. It's got a Christian Bale as Moses, Moses. It's a reasonably enjoyable movie. God is portrayed by a child in the film. And Moses looks like a crazy person about half of the time. I don't know if that's a directorial choice or an actor's choice. Christian Bale is a very talented actor, but

Katie Dooley  09:56

frequently looks crazy. Absolutely. But I like going through his filmography in my mind, and I'm like, I can't think of a time he acted like a normal human.

Preston Meyer  10:06

There were a few instances as Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins, where he pulled off being a reasonably balanced playboy. A couple of scenes.

Katie Dooley  10:18

And I just feel like reasonably balanced and Playboy shouldn't go together, but yeah, burning bush High as a kite talks to

Preston Meyer  10:31

God. Yeah. And God tells him, Your people are slaves in Egypt, and you need to free them. Moses, like not can't do it. And God's like, don't worry, we're gonna make this happen, basically forces Moses into this situation that he doesn't like, and do

Katie Dooley  10:48

that. Right didn't do to Abraham. Right? Or Jesus. Yeah.

Preston Meyer  10:54

God puts people in tough situations all the time. And to save a nation, why not? So Moses goes back to Egypt with the meets up with his brother Aaron, who's a few years older than him and his older sister, and they show up to the Pharaoh's court. Presumably at this point, the pharaoh was his brother, his adopted brother rather than his Father, The Prince of Egypt is doing a pretty good job of engraving that tradition in people's minds. decent movie. DreamWorks did some great work there. Yeah. So they went back to Egypt. And they say, Hey, Let my people go. And eventually, they do after the Pharaoh says, No plagues, no more flags, no more flags, stop it. No more plagues, worse plagues. Eventually, God just kills all the firstborn in Egypt, probably not the whole kingdom. But I mean, realistically, more likely, a small isolated place like the lower part of the capital city, maybe there's loads of guesses on that one. We don't really know what the story is trying to communicate there. But an awful lot of first born in Egypt are killed, including the pharaohs own son. And then he says, Fine go, and the Israelites hightail it out of Egypt, taking loads of gold and jewelry and precious things with them, they leave very rich, which is a very bad thing for Egypt. And so the Pharaoh chases them. And as they cross the read, see, the pharaohs army gets drowned out by the ocean. Gee,

Katie Dooley  12:46

I mean, I don't think it needs explanation. But in my readings for this, that the read sea becomes the Red Sea, which is what most people are familiar with. That wasn't a miss. Speak by Preston. That is it was the Red Sea.

Preston Meyer  13:00

So it's a tricky thing that we know the story was telling about the crossing of the read sea. And the story shifted to the red sea, but they are actually two different bodies of water

Katie Dooley  13:15

testing. Was that far. Does the read seek exists? Do we know where it is? Like, because we know

Preston Meyer  13:23

the the Nile Delta, I remember correctly, that's

Katie Dooley  13:27

just for like archaeological proof. They're like no layman read, which it's right here it happened. That's when I heard that was the reason for the change if they're two different bodies, which I didn't realize,

Preston Meyer  13:38

yeah, it's, it's kind of a weird thing that stories do over time, as they change to become more awesome grants, the read see is it's a decent bit of water. But it's not the Red Sea doesn't show up on maps like there. It won't be on your globe the way the Red Sea is. And so then the Israelites wander around in the desert for 40 years. If you check a map, you can see that you can make that walk in about two weeks. So the big question is, why did it take 40 years thanks. So much zigzagging so much camping and avoiding going to the Holy Land for decades. So right after they leave Egypt, Moses sends out a couple of guys, Caleb and Joshua. Actually, his name wasn't even Joshua, his name was homeshare. Bose has changed his name to Yehoshua later. And there's loads of theological thoughts on that because that is approximately the name of Jesus. And so he sends Caleb and Hoshi off to go see the Holy Land scouted out. Holy Land is not a huge place of land compared to Alberta, but it's not a small space. And there's also a bunch of other guys to go out with them and All these other guys that don't get to be named because they suck, lie about it and say these people are scary. We don't stand a chance. And Caleb N pushchair, say, You know what, we can do this. And Israel, for the most part believes the greater number of witnesses and says we're not going. So Moses like, fine. We're just kind of wander around the wilderness for 40 years until all of you are dead years.

Katie Dooley  15:29

You can do in two and a half weeks. It's just man. I can't imagine

Preston Meyer  15:37

they set up camp, they move camp a few times. They fight several battles with other nations those years, but they hold up on this land that they don't want. Waiting for everybody who wasn't ready to go to their destination to die. Wow. Moses himself doesn't even actually get to the Holy Land. He gets to see it from a hill. And that's it. And Caleb and Joshua as we know him now, Hoshi have got that new name. They get to go into the holy land. The Book of Joshua is a direct sequel to The Five Books of Moses because he is the new leader put in place after Moses. And that's basically the Exodus Joshua leads them conquering all the people who refuse to be good neighbors, and destroying loads and loads of people. Part some parts of the Bible say Joshua killed literally everybody who wasn't going to be faithful to the Israelite God. And then other parts of like, yeah, no, we left way too many unfaithful here. The Bible is a fun text there. There's a claims of there's so righteous having defeated all of the infidels, and then these others just like, ya know, we were in trouble because we left them alive.

Katie Dooley  17:07

The next biggest one I think of is King David. And David and Goliath. I mean, that's when he is a kid. But he becomes King David.

Preston Meyer  17:15

Yeah, Israel, at the time really wanted a king. They thought, hey, our neighbors love kings, and look how powerful they are. And the the chieftain at the time, called a judge usually was like, God is our king. You don't need a king. God is your king to call anyone else King is gonna spell ruin for the nation. And they're like, no, we want a king. And so Samuel, the chieftain, prays and guest direction to put in this fella named Saul as the king of Israel Better Call Saul, right? The problem is it didn't work out. Oh, no, a little bit like a lawyer. It just didn't really work out. And Saul was given all the opportunities to try and be good, but he just kept screwing up. And so he Samuel got this revelation that no don't, this is not a good thing. But instead of saying to Saul, you can't be king anymore. He just goes over to this other little family over in the Bethlehem area. And he says to the Father of this family, Jesse, one of your sons is going to be king. Let me meet with them. And Jesse shows off his biggest, strongest sons, the eldest, and look how great they are. And Samuel is like, Nah, they're not great. And

Katie Dooley  18:47

I really hope it says that. They're not great. Yeah.

Preston Meyer  18:52

He's he gets fancy language about looking at the soul kind of thing. And then he spots David and he's like, this one's special. This is the guy. And David later goes on to defeat Goliath in combat in the weirdest way. challenging him the best of the nation against the best of the other nation. And instead of duel of swords and or clubs or anything else, the rock basically just throws a

Katie Dooley  19:23

rock at him. David Hobbit

Preston Meyer  19:27

he was supposed to be pretty young, but probably not Hobbit sighs I would imagine he was at least 16 at the time. So he would have been regular sized regular size for his nation at the time. 3000

Katie Dooley  19:43

years ago. Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Preston Meyer  19:47

So there's that. And David also turns out to be a really not good kick. Now he does all kinds of things. He's not supposed to. Flooded with that she but he does. As he also has a serious problem with doing things he's specifically told not to do. So in the royal court, there's always a prophet, a person who speaks for God, to warn the king, hey, there's some pretty good reasons why you shouldn't do some of these things. One of those things is taken account of the nation for the purposes of building armies. Or, alternatively, counting the people to tax them even heavier. Because you feel like you deserve more money than you're getting problems for kings. David's like, we're going to count all the people and the army and tax them. Yeah. And a province. Like, if you do this, God will kill your nation. And then he's like, Yeah, we're gonna do it anyway. And then huge numbers of Israelites die all across the nation of some terrible plague COVID-19. Yeah, bad things. They had no power to stop it. Medicine at the time definitely sucked, especially in their little pocket of the world. And anytime you did have St. Leprosy, you would go to the priest, because the priests were the most educated, just generally, if anyone could read, your priest could read, if anybody knew a lot about taking care of things other than cheap, it was probably the priests. So they were basically your doctors. And the guy who's got some sort of authority over all of the faithful in the nation, just told you don't do this thing. So that sucks. Yeah, David just wasn't a great king. He wanted to build a temple, Israel had a very small portable temple, like a large tent, by our standards today. And the Prophet told David, don't do it. It's okay if you collect all the stuff to do it. But your son will be the one to do it because you are not pious enough. Look at what you've been. So there's a whole lot of songs ascribe to David, some people will think that David himself wrote a lot of music that became the Psalms in the Hebrew Bible. There's perfectly acceptable number of scholars who are 100% committed to the idea that there's, like we see today, loads of people writing Psalms, as though they were David. You know, writing from somebody else's perspective. Yeah. Which is a perfectly normal literary practice that is definitely older than a lot of people give it credit for, like the Books of Moses, probably written by a dude who or a collection of dudes. And they were definitely dudes.

Katie Dooley  22:55

Women should read and write God.

Preston Meyer  23:01

And you know, just just scribing things to Moses. There's parts that say Moses was the humblest man that there ever was. It's fun to say, look at Moses awarding himself as the humblest man, because it's in one of the books of Moses was written probably decades or centuries later, by another dude or several dudes.

Katie Dooley  23:22

You mentioned King Davidson and the temple, which I think is a very important point to

Preston Meyer  23:27

Solomon's Temple is a huge deal. It's a massive undertaking, it took seven years to build. And if you were to see the building, you would realize that seven years is way too long to take on building this tiny structure. You've seen the Mormon temple here in the city, right? Yeah. So the Temple of Solomon was half that size. Wow. And it took them seven and a half years.

Katie Dooley  23:54

I mean, it took them 40 years to cross it desert. So I'm not surprised. Yeah,

Preston Meyer  23:59

Israel does have a tendency to take a little longer to do they drag their heels at this point. And when you read the story, you see that they have a lot of issues with faith. Moses takes up ah, takes off the mountain. And he's gone for, you know, a little over a month. And in that time, they're like, you know, we're gonna go back to worshipping Egyptian gods, we're gonna build a new calf out of gold and all this nonsense, things that really pissed me off when it comes back down and say, Hey, what are you up to?

Katie Dooley  24:28

I was only gone. Yeah,

Preston Meyer  24:30

I mean, also disappearing off the hill for a month.

Katie Dooley  24:33

I mean, again, 40 years, seven years a month. Well, the same to

Preston Meyer  24:39

kind of track their heels. I feel like we're starting to edge up onto the, just the, the edge of racist. We're gonna try not to do that too much.

Katie Dooley  24:55

So King, David son, is it prophesized Is that the right word? To rebuild the temple.

Preston Meyer  25:03

So there is yeah, that's the son of David, mysterious person, I don't know who he is, but he's supposed to be of that royal line. He's supposed to come back, save Israel and rebuild the temple, or at least be associated with the rebuilding of the temple in some way.

Katie Dooley  25:17

So I, this is a really, I've always found this as an interesting fact. So, Judaism is waiting for this Messiah, the son of King David to rebuild the temple. This is this line, that Christians believe that Messiah is Jesus, and he's already come. So that's, that's the, that's the line between Judaism and Christianity.

Preston Meyer  25:39

I mean, ultimately, Christianity, when it first came about was hardly distinguishable from Judaism apart from, apart from believing that this Jesus person is that Promised Messiah. Problem is he died without rebuilding, or without being at all associated with the building of the temple. King Herod had done a lot of work to renovate the temple and make it up to his standards, whatever it was at the time, but Jesus was barely associated with the temple in his day. And so both Jews and Christians are waiting for the coming of the Messiah in the future, and the rebuilding of that temple of Jerusalem perfect. But I think we're just moving a little away from our focus and being as many people are easily distracted by Christians.

Katie Dooley  26:31

I just wanted to point out that that is that line, maybe the next thing we should talk about is how this materializes in the in, in today's world, so the Torah and the Talmud. I am hesitant, because I'm scared to get around the tar is the Five Books of Moses. And the Talmud is everything that the rabbi's have argued about. And the Torah

Preston Meyer  26:59

of the Talmud is the writings of some rabbis, because obviously, we still have rabbis stay who aren't adding to it. And there's loads of rabbinical writings that aren't included in the Talmud that are ancient and revered. In addition to those, there's also the other parts of the Hebrew Bible, often called the Tanakh, which is an acronym that to knock is a three letter acronym. T stands for torah, the law in the books of Moses, the Nebby, M is the prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, those are big ones. And then there's a bunch of minor prophets. And then you've got the Ketuvim, the writings, that includes the wisdom books, the songs, Chronicles, the history that didn't make it into those other two sections. And it's often thought that it's like this book, the Bible is written by God, I think I've addressed this before. People believe it, I don't understand why you can't open the book and believe that they're written by a whole bunch of people. It's a national library. Like if you were to assemble a canon of English literature, you'd have Dickens and Shakespeare modernly, you'd probably add Rowling to that as well.

Katie Dooley  28:21

And I mean, even Shakespeare's even argued that he there was no way he could have written it all by himself. Exactly. That's probably a really good comparison. You

Preston Meyer  28:29

look at Stephen King, and how prolific his writings are, many of which are not high quality. And it's easy enough to believe that Shakespeare could have written that volume, but producing that volume, and that quality level is either absolute genius or otherwise unbelievable. And, you know, whatever it Shakespeare, we can't say, oh, yeah, it was Francis Bacon, he wrote half of it. Okay, I don't really care. If I say Shakespeare's Hamlet, you know what I'm talking about. And so there's, the Hebrew Bible is just a national library. You have fiction in the National Library. That just makes sense. You've got song books, you've got Wisdom literature, you've got sets of Proverbs as a subset to that, that, I think is a nifty thing. The proverbs are mostly adopted from another nation. And then you've got the prophets, all these people who say, hey, Israel, stop being so terrible. And the nation actually kept definitely not all of it in their national library in a volume that was actually preserved as it got translated for the Jews and Alexandria and across the world. It's kind of cool, but to say that it's one cohesive book that should not under any circumstance contradict another part of itself. It is problematic and to think that it was all written by God is unsupportable? Well,

Katie Dooley  30:06

that's one interesting thing about today is that I definitely haven't seen in other religions and my research is that they're encouraged to argue and debate like Jewish people are known for that. That being said, there are still, you know, there's, we're gonna get into the different types of Judaism and conservative values or orthodox values where, if you differ, they think you're wrong. But there is a huge practice of debating the content of the Torah. And that's where the Talmud comes from. It's these debates

Preston Meyer  30:44

about Jesus going back to that easily found distraction is absolutely the typical forsake rabbi. He argued all the time. And know about the law. Yeah, with other rabbis. They, there's loads of people who like to say all the Pharisees were bad. Jesus definitely grew up in a Pharisee family. And everything about his teaching practice and style was absolutely in line with that tradition.

Katie Dooley  31:20

Is that a good segue into the different types? Sure. Today ism. Yeah, that will be one tackle next to there's a lot to talk about, because there's, like the biblical side, and the historical side. And then I'm sure our parishioners are congregants, you guys are

Preston Meyer  31:37

probably more interested in learning how to deal with your neighbors of various types.

Katie Dooley  31:41

Right? And what everyday practices are, why did they have two fridges?

Preston Meyer  31:46

Oh, definitely to keep things separate, but aren't supposed to touch or even be stored near each other. So now lead to separate sets of pans. So

Katie Dooley  31:55

we'll get there. But let's start with there's unlike crochet, there's about three types of Judaism it I mean, a few more, but you can do break it down into three big groups. Let's the start sort of, yeah, let's start with orthodox because it is definitely the most rural following. This is where the Hasidic tradition falls under. So if you picture a Jewish person from New York, the only place in the world I've ever seen or Israel, I guess it'd be the other place out there. All of them there. These are the men with the curls and the beards and the big black hats in Israel chanting at the wall.

Preston Meyer  32:43

Yeah. So these are the people who are generally. And I feel like within every group, you're going to have some dissidents, but as a reasonably fair generalization, they are super committed to following the law of Moses as it is recorded in the Bible. As well as pretty much every legal judgment from the rabbi's since then, on how to deal with those laws in the Bible. My

Katie Dooley  33:12

my show notes say that they believe the law is binding and revealed by God so they're definitely the strictest of these denominations or onward, but denominations loose groupings

Preston Meyer  33:29

loose

Katie Dooley  33:30

group. They won't we're gonna get into their practices later, but they have the strictest dietary practices, they'll have the strictest dress codes. Yeah, yeah, I mean, those are short for modern practices. They'll some I want to say the like something the Sabbath, they keep the Sabbath holy. Sure. They keep the Sabbath. Yeah, they all they all keep the Sabbath holy, but they will take it to a much stricter

Preston Meyer  34:01

level. gonna remind our audience that the thing that most of you probably already know, the Jewish Sabbath is Saturday.

Katie Dooley  34:09

And that's because God rested on Saturday. He did a whole week of work. And then he got tired, put his feet up. He

Preston Meyer  34:17

took a chill day. And I can definitely agree with the need for that.

Katie Dooley  34:24

The Sabbath. I mean, like Christians have their Sunday and I think Muslims are Friday, Seventh Day Adventists if you're Christian or Saturday as well. The Jewish community doesn't do any work on Saturday. In my readings, it's actually considered one of the holiest days and it happens every week. So imagine having Easter if you're Christian or pseudo Christian, every week, so they have a big meal at the synagogue and then they don't do any work on Saturday. And that is that will vary. How they define work will vary from I'm forced the docs to conservative to reform. Yeah. So with that being said, the next group is conservative.

Preston Meyer  35:09

Some slightly less conservative.

Katie Dooley  35:12

Orthodox is yeah, it's the middle between reform and orthodoxy. They you might see the men wear yarmulke more frequently, but they probably won't have the curls or the beards, but they might they might.

Preston Meyer  35:29

Yeah, probably not in many cases. That's all I have for now it's on conservative. Yeah, they're just kind of the middle ground or Yeah.

Katie Dooley  35:38

They're probably Yeah. Moderately strict on dress. Yeah, they're kind of Yeah, that's what wigs. Yes, we will get into organizing get into that. And then reform is the loosey goosey of the three, so they might not conform to any of the dietary restrictions at all. They might not do any of the dress. They are. This could even be some of the examples I saw are like Jerry Seinfeld's Jewish like he's probably nonpracticing, but he grew up in a Jewish household and how they define this is another subject we'll get to in a moment, but whether Judaism is a race versus a religion, but you are Jewish, if your mother was Jewish, so Jerry Seinfeld's mother was Jewish, and whether he Yeah, so whether he eats bacon or not, he's Jewish. And so reform can go into that group a little bit as well. I

Preston Meyer  36:38

definitely think there's a strong overlap between those two groups. Yeah. Or

Katie Dooley  36:43

Yes, like me and Christianity. You know, we celebrate Christmas, who we celebrated Easter, we never went to church that, you know, and then you'll get some who go to church for Passover or Hanukkah, or churches synagogue for Passover or Hanukkah. And that's kind of it and when their grandmas over, they won't eat pork, but if they're out with friends, they'll put bacon on their barn or so. Bacon

Preston Meyer  37:07

on their cheeseburger.

Katie Dooley  37:12

Oh, that's so bad Preston. So those are the three. It's

Preston Meyer  37:17

It's easy enough for the the Reform Jews to not worry so much about those dietary restrictions and a lot of the other cleanliness, purity, ritual cleanliness, laws. Because the way it's worded in the Torah, it's all about you don't go to the temple, unless you are ritually pure. And since the temple has been destroyed for almost 2000 years, more conservative Jews will ascribe those same limitations to go into the synagogue, whereas reformed Jews typically don't seem to. They just don't worry about it at all. Because there's that reason for following those laws is no longer present.

Katie Dooley  38:00

And yes, and I want to point out that reform is actually quite old. It started in the late 1800s, during the Enlightenment, so it was a way for reform came about so that Jewish people could participate more in secular society, and be part of the Enlightenment and have some of those ideas. Yeah, they address impurity or not, with holiness or spirituality that those things don't have any. You can say you can eat bacon and still be a holy person. Yeah. Let's talk about some of these practices and rules and observances that was alluded to and the degrees through orthodoxy to perform. Alright,

Preston Meyer  38:51

let's start with that shock that you had when I put cheese on that bacon burger. I

Katie Dooley  38:56

distinctly remember this from my one religious studies class. And I was very excited to like, look it up again. So there is a line and x, x Exodus. There's a line in Exodus 2319. Like if

Preston Meyer  39:14

you took notes? The line Oh, I didn't write down like, you will not boil a kid in its mother's milk.

Katie Dooley  39:24

Yes, you will not boil a kid's mother's milk. So that you might have more recent information or more refreshed information than I do. But essentially, it's that you wouldn't. The kid they're talking about is a goat. Yes,

Preston Meyer  39:39

not a human child, but a kid that you're allowed to eat under Jewish law, which does strictly forbid cannibalism.

Katie Dooley  39:47

So they, yes. So cannibalize your neighbors, so that it would be very hard to do nowadays I think because dairy cows cattle and beef cattle are very are separate. Yeah, the idea is that you don't know where you necessarily know where your milk came from or where you're from. Or if you were, you know, however many 1000 years ago, it would have been the same, you would have milked your goat until it couldn't do it anymore, and then you would have slaughtered it

Preston Meyer  40:19

just reminded me of the horsemeat scandal from a couple years back.

Katie Dooley  40:24

So it is that you don't know where where the milk versus meat came from, or the cheese or it I mean, it's meat and dairy that they keep separate, based off of this one small line in Exodus. Other dietary restrictions include they do not eat shellfish,

Preston Meyer  40:43

right. If it lives in the water, it has to have fins and scales

Katie Dooley  40:47

off at the same time. They can't eat a shark, right? Shark

Preston Meyer  40:51

scales are actually lies their teeth, their whole bodies coated in tea. Sharks are super creepy. I

Katie Dooley  40:57

believe. That yes, and then No pork, right? So ever either. No clove and Anna no hooved they must have cloven if

Preston Meyer  41:10

it chooses cut and has a cloven hoof, you're fine.

Katie Dooley  41:13

So you can eat cows, you can go and you can eat horses or pigs. Right? Camels are right. Oh no, I love camel. So those are the big dietary restrictions. And as Preston alluded to, and again, this will change depending on how orthodox to reform your Jewish people will have often separate fridges, separate cutlery, separate plates, separate cooking utensils, to to obey this law so that they never touch. And I remember hearing that. If you have had like a milkshake, they will wait a certain number of hours before eating

Preston Meyer  41:52

meat. Yeah, a cheese cake right after a steak dinner is a big no, no, that sounds delicious. You just got it. You just gotta have a little window of time in between your meal and your dessert

Katie Dooley  42:03

so that they never touch. Yep, another piece of dietary. I guess I wouldn't call this one restriction. But is meat has to be kosher. Everything has to be

Preston Meyer  42:14

kosher. So the word kosher comes from the word cash route, which basically is just the dietary law.

Katie Dooley  42:23

So there you go. Yeah. So they have to eat kosher

Preston Meyer  42:27

meats. Yeah, things that follow those laws, dietary laws,

Katie Dooley  42:31

so blood is not kosher never. So the big thing with kosher meat is that it has to be slaughtered in a particular way and all the blood drain. And this is actually very similar, if not identical to Hello. So hello, the blood similarity. And I know And hello, the blood needs to be drained as well in a certain way. So kosher meat has to be all the blood drain in a specific way. And then it is salted with kosher salt. And that is essentially how you make meat kosher. I remember asking a Jewish friend what Kosher salt is? And he said, Well, it's a salt use to make things kosher. I was like cool. But How's it different from table salt are either nice salt or Himalayan pink sea salt, like what is actually because I can go buy Kosher salt in the in the grocery store, but I can also go buy some regular salt in the grocery store. So what actually makes it different, fun fact it is flakier, lighter texture, and it has a milder flavor. That so I really didn't answer the question, what is kosher salt, but that's what makes it different. From a culinary perspective,

Preston Meyer  43:49

I now feel the need to look up what the chemical makeup of Kosher so I'm pretty

Katie Dooley  43:53

sure all salt of NaCl and then oh, there's a wide

Preston Meyer  43:57

variety of salts. It does look a lot different from your regular table salt. But so it does consist mainly of sodium chloride NaCl, but it also usually includes an anti caking agent. Interesting. Yeah. So it looks a little bit.

Katie Dooley  44:18

That's probably your powder. Yeah, here you go. So that's I think that's the big portion for the dietary laws and dietary restrictions. I don't think we'll get into holidays right now. And what, that's the whole thing but if you're interested send us an email or DMS on Instagram, if anything we talked about here because this is really just an overview episode piques your interest, let us know and we will do a full episode on it. But they're known for lefties that Passover Hanukkah

Preston Meyer  44:54

Hanukkah cancer pastor repeating it for you now. Hot black cars are definitely of Hanukkah. Why do I keep saying Passover?

Katie Dooley  45:04

I just remember coming to your house for lackeys.

Preston Meyer  45:07

Yes, that was definitely a Hanukkah.

Katie Dooley  45:11

I can remember but they just like any tradition they have their their big foods that they eat at different times of the year.

Preston Meyer  45:18

oily foods are definitely a big deal, especially for Hanukkah but honestly, year round. Just like America,

Katie Dooley  45:27

I just read something about brisket. They like brisket for some celebrate that

Preston Meyer  45:32

chest meat on the cow. I mean, also the horses got a decent chest to name. Kosher.

Katie Dooley  45:42

Yeah, so some other observances and practices. I think I feel like most I didn't know this until later in life. I mean, being in Canada, we don't have a huge Jewish population worldwide, the Jewish population is quite small, but married Jewish women and again, Orthodox versus reformed, married Jewish women cover their hair. So again, very similar to Islam. And there's a lot of once we do the Islamic episode, there's a lot of similarities between Judaism and Islam. So married women cover their hair. And that can be with a scarf or a hat. But most often, and this is very interesting to me is with a wig. So they just put hair over their

Preston Meyer  46:26

hair. Yeah, it's for that for Canadians. In our audience. Many of you should be familiar with shits Creek. It's gotten an awful lot of awards, wildly popular, starring the wonderful Eugene Levy and his son Daniel chips, and Catherine O'Hare. And yeah, they're kind of famously Jewish family. And Catherine O'Hair wears a wig. Almost all the time. Yeah, in the show. I don't know about real

Katie Dooley  46:56

life. Okay. I've never actually seen shits Creek. So

Preston Meyer  46:59

it's very funny. And it's got a lot of heart. I, and it's over now.

Katie Dooley  47:03

I've seen a lot in the news about it, because it's over. Yeah, I mean, they'll get on that.

Preston Meyer  47:08

It won a lot of awards. And I think they're fairly earned. Good. And Eugene Levy is just a comedy genius. All

Katie Dooley  47:16

right. Any family? Yeah. Yes, so Jewish women cover their hair, and Jewish man and cover their heads as well.

Preston Meyer  47:27

But usually just with a book, and some groups with a smaller head and some groups with a head that covers your whole head so that God can't see you at all. And then.

Katie Dooley  47:39

And then again, sometimes it's every single day, and then sometimes it's only for special occasions. And special occasion can be the Sabbath weekly, or it could just be a wedding or a bar mitzvah.

Preston Meyer  47:52

Yeah. So the haircut ring for women is actually a thing that's interesting to me. I've worked with a lot more Muslim women than I've worked with Jewish women. And for those really devout Muslim women, they wear that scarf to cover their hair. And the explanation that was given to me was that the hair is just a wonderfully sexy thing, which is a hard point to argue, I must agree. And that's clearly not the motivation for women. Because if you're just covering your hair with a Where is that's not getting rid of the the luer, that visible thing that definitely works on a lot of guys

Katie Dooley  48:34

had no idea. And then it's also at a different stage. So the hijab in Islam, it can be at a specific age, or when you start menstruating and the rest of the rest of your life, and then the only people that see you without it and this is the same as in Judaism is Is your husband or men on your mother's side. So that can be your brothers or your mom's brothers, so your uncles but not your dad's uncles. Right. Whereas this is like once you get married. So that's it, you know, so until the day you get married, people see your hair, whether you're a little different. So for 38 and then the reason for the Amaka and correct me if I'm wrong. I don't think I'm wrong. The reason for the Amaka is to always be aware of God's presence. It's a physical reminder that God's watching you.

Preston Meyer  49:39

I like to believe that a God that is all knowing no

Katie Dooley  49:44

is the master. Well,

Preston Meyer  49:46

I mean, he can choose what to see if he's all powerful. And he knows when you're done and he knows when it's safe to look. Santa Claus on the other hand, I mean, he sees you and you're sleeping. I don't think that God is so indiscreet.

Katie Dooley  50:11

Ignore tangent, don't agree, challenge and laugh along with this. That is the reason for the Amaka. Now, moving on to I would like to talk a little bit more about the Sabbath because they mentioned there's different how do they define work?

Preston Meyer  50:26

So, an awful lot of argument on theirs. And

Katie Dooley  50:30

I have seen I think it was an Religulous with with Bill Maher Del Mar. I

Preston Meyer  50:38

haven't seen that show in so long you need to rewatch it, we were going to rewatch it in my last semester of my degree, just as part of one of my broad look at religious phenomena things. But thanks to COVID We had no more classes and as much as I did enjoy that movie, I did not take the time to go and re watch it on my own separate from my disappearing classes.

Katie Dooley  51:01

I gave it to my dad, I could hook you up with okay, I believe it is really Religulous. If it's not someone out there is going to correct me. But he goes to a Jewish and obviously an Orthodox Jewish family's home. And they have like Rube Goldberg up their house so that they can open the fridge on a Saturday because in their mind that is considered work. They have like figured like they will not lift a finger. They figured out like you said Rube Goldberg it up so they can answer the phone up on a Saturday. Yeah,

Preston Meyer  51:34

an awful lot of Orthodox Jews that won't push buttons. Yeah, that's fine. I think that's derived from because having anything operated by push buttons is relatively new. That the the button pushing his drive from prohibition against doing up the buttons on your shirt are interesting. And so you'll see anybody that if you see Jews walking around on a Saturday, or Friday evening, and that's usually how they'll get around, they'll make sure that they're walking is within the prescribed distance because they can drive Yes,

Katie Dooley  52:10

that is one that will be followed by I'd say easily, both Orthodox and conservative and maybe even some reform.

Preston Meyer  52:18

Probably some are fine.

Katie Dooley  52:21

They just want the day off. Like if they if they needed milk, they'd probably be like, Okay, I'll go get some milk. But if they could avoid it, like I'm gonna like, like definitely shopping

Preston Meyer  52:31

on Saturday, or Friday evening. As much as possible, though, I'm sure that there's plenty of folks who agree that when the ox is in the mire, you got to pull it out. But there's plenty of arguments against that too. Sometimes, like as a sign from God, your ox is doomed. You're gonna go without milk. Elevators, those elevators with no doors that just keep moving in the cycle. The idea is terrifying to me. But if you're used to it, and you can operate them safely.

Katie Dooley  53:06

Yes. So driving, I know answering the phone is a big one as well. And I you know what, on the Saturday, I don't know if I disagree.

Preston Meyer  53:15

Any day where I don't have to push a button. I spent an awful lot of time on my computer on my phone. My phone has three buttons, right.

Katie Dooley  53:26

There has been in some of the articles I was reading a like a resurgence in the Sabbath. I mean, we're in the 21st century, it's pretty hard to avoid working seven days a week, everything's open all the time. And so there's been a varying that there's been a resurgence of people like taking the Sabbath, and just actually enjoying that disconnect time from their phone and from their work and actually stepping away. And I don't think that's a bad idea. Yeah, there's

Preston Meyer  54:00

still loads of places that have Sabbath day laws where you're not allowed to do business on a Sabbath, plenty of places in America. That's always Sunday. But it's still a thing that's observed. Of course, there's preference given to Christians and non Jews, because yea, separation of church and state didn't work so great.

Katie Dooley  54:20

I'm sure in the Jewish Quarter in New York, everything's got phones. Oh, absolutely.

Preston Meyer  54:23

But it's not enforced by law. It's just the culture has so completely saturated that neighborhood that that's the way it goes. And if that's the way you want to live, that is absolutely a desirable way to have it run.

Katie Dooley  54:39

We got I mean, we have more things to talk about. I just have a segue to them nicely.

Preston Meyer  54:43

I would just bump onto the next thing if you want to. So I got

Katie Dooley  54:48

circumcision. Yeah. Which all which leads into apartments because yeah,

Preston Meyer  54:52

it's all part of that law of sacrifice, which, weirdly, we've only barely brushed up against up to this point.

Katie Dooley  54:59

Oh, you look like you're right into. It's

Preston Meyer  55:02

fascinating to me that there's so much around the perception of the sacrifices that a lot of people think is negative, like the idea that, Oh, no, sacrificing a goat is barbaric. Not at all. Most of the sacrifices that were offered at the temple and the tabernacle before that, they were basically just, I'm going to call them holy barbecues, who, like there were the odd sacrifices that were an animal is burnt up completely as a gift to God. But most were eaten by the people offering the sacrifices. And more so the priests and their families, so that it was, and these were offered daily, there was a sacrifice every single day. Oh, we have a holy barbecue this summer. I think we probably should. And so these holy barbecues happened all the time, the flame was never supposed to go out. And I mean, you obviously weren't cooking meat at three in the morning. But that fire had to keep burning. I, a little piece of me suspects that every nation that had a fire that couldn't be permitted to go out, had a population was really bad at starting fire. Katie, I can't say for sure that that's the case. I mean, we've had fire for such a long time. We've been good at it as a species for quite a while. 10s of 1000s of years. Right. But a little piece of me wonders, you know. But these holy barbecues, were great. They were well attended on a regular basis. And depending on who you talk to, there's plenty of suggestion that these priests who were meant to feed their families with these offerings, would also share them with the poor. So ultimately, the sacrifices are far from barbaric.

Katie Dooley  57:09

I really want to barbecue

Preston Meyer  57:10

now. Right? And so circumcision going back to what we started here, is part of the law of sacrifice. It is part of that shedding of your own blood to bring you closer to God. Now, it's supposed to be just dudes. But for some reason, there are parts of the world who have taken this practice of circumcision, separated it from the religious aspects of Judaism, and have just started doing terrible things to women, which I don't understand how it's validated. And it makes me uncomfortable to female circumcision is never prescribed in the Bible, and is a lot more destructive than male circumcision.

Katie Dooley  58:05

So I have read and in my notes, it has to be done eight days after the boys born Yes,

Preston Meyer  58:12

in a specific time, when Jewish boys are supposed to be circumcised adult

Katie Dooley  58:16

male Sukkur, circumcision is very destructive. Don't do it later in life.

Preston Meyer  58:21

Well, the trick is like, how do you know? The like, you're not gonna have an erection? When you're still healing? That's super hard to take care of.

Katie Dooley  58:36

Yeah, just circumcised as a baby cool. If you weren't cool, believe it. I was gonna say Don't touch it. That's fine. Like.

Preston Meyer  58:46

Sure. Imagine if Wolverine was Jewish. Let's be like a daily. Well, I probably wouldn't have to be daily probably just be once a week kind of deal. Having the ability to regrow every last bit of your body quickly would be a problem.

Katie Dooley  59:04

I've never thought that way about Well, thanks, Preston. But you will never know. What is the

Preston Meyer  59:15

I think this is why people listen to us.

Katie Dooley  59:19

The reason it is a tradition in the Jewish religion to cut off for skins, is because God asked Abraham to do it and that he would be gifted a great nation. Yeah. And so ever since then, we've been chopping off penises

Preston Meyer  59:35

to be part of that nation. You have to You're not chopping off penises. Just a little bit off the end.

Katie Dooley  59:43

mean they're a little bit chopped off the end of your nose, not

Preston Meyer  59:47

not even a little so it's part of that law of sacrifice that binds the nation together and was a thing thing that caused a lot of shame for a lot of Jews say 2000 years ago back in the gymnasiums of Rome, were to be part of that larger Imperial community. You had to hang out in these gymnasiums, where everybody did so completely naked. Do you ever watch Friends? Yes, yes. Do you remember Joey's fake foreskin? No,

Katie Dooley  1:00:23

I haven't. I've only seen some episodes of friends. To watch this. There

Preston Meyer  1:00:28

is testament that that was happening 2000 years ago in, in Israel. I mean, I don't know if it's salami, but maybe it's only works that proudly. Yeah, that's an important point. I was actually just about to say they probably weren't using a pig for skin even though it might have worked out in color. But there was something that was done that allowed these people to mask themselves as being non Jews, because apparently that was the thing they were worried about when going to the gymnasium.

Katie Dooley  1:01:04

Well, that was I don't actually know. I'm about to say something I don't know, frequently. Go for it. Was that uses that identifier for the Holocaust? Because you?

Preston Meyer  1:01:18

I feel like, I feel like in the Holocaust, there was definitely some inspection. But I don't think at least to begin with. Many people were being secretive about their Jewish identity. But later on, I feel like yeah, there was probably people who were checking just to say, hey, because most Christians, especially in that area in that era, probably weren't doing circumcision on a regular basis.

Katie Dooley  1:01:46

I mean, that's basically all my points unless you wanna talk about Bar Mitzvah. Why, why we should wrap up with the Holocaust as depressing as it is, but it should be touched upon and eventually a full episode. True on the Holocaust. Do you have anything you want about Bar Mitzvahs with foreskin?

Preston Meyer  1:02:02

The bar mitzvahs aren't strictly associated with foreskin. Because your Bar Mitzvah happens, like when you're pubescent? Yeah, your foreskin comes off and you're a week old. And the bar mitzvah happens when you're pubescent. So you've got the opportunity to show to the congregation that you have learned stuff that you can recite your Haftorah. And you say, Yeah, I'm familiar with the law. I know what it means to be a Jewish man, or in the case of a button mitzvah to be a Jewish woman in this world. And that's the, what's the word? I'm looking for? The Rite of Passage, that's perfect. That's the rite of passage in Judaism, it's pretty common in most cultures in the world, there's a rite of passage that makes you an adult. For some it Yeah, yeah. Sweet.

Katie Dooley  1:02:55

16 is your kind of secular confirmation. If you're Catholic baptism, baptism can depend whether you do it at birth or older. But

Preston Meyer  1:03:04

yeah. And so sometimes that rite of passage is a walkabout. Sometimes it's a camp with a bunch of other guys. And sometimes it's showing that you actually know what it means to be a man in the world, which actually makes a lot more sense than a lot of the other rites of passage.

Katie Dooley  1:03:21

Yeah. Yeah, my last two points. So tetragrammaton, which I just like, think it's super cool.

Preston Meyer  1:03:27

It's a cool sounding word. And what is your

Katie Dooley  1:03:31

friends? It's like the one thing I remember, it's no, I remember more than that. But can I see what tetragrammaton is?

Preston Meyer  1:03:39

Can you pronounce that? What the tetragrammaton is?

Katie Dooley  1:03:42

No one can. That's why it's so cool.

Preston Meyer  1:03:47

There's so much disagreement on how it would be pronounced.

Katie Dooley  1:03:52

I just, I just want to jump right in. Because it's like the one thing I get really oddly excited about. This is one of those facts you need to take home this week to your families and be like, Do you know what tetragrammaton is? It is from the Hebrew Bible. And it's the name of God. And the Hebrew language generally doesn't use vowels.

Preston Meyer  1:04:17

Correct. Their alphabet consists entirely of consonants and glottal stops, and

Katie Dooley  1:04:21

those things people learn and know how to fill in the blanks. So there's four letters Tetra. In the Bible, why H W. H. And it's the name of God and we have some guesses on how it is said. The other thing is, is that it was taken out of Bibles because of the law that you don't take the Lord's name in vain. So you can actually just kind of true kind of shoot well finish my thought and then you can come back and correct me. So I have heard that they've taken out of later versions that Whatever It Takes slurs and vain if you're just you're not actually his name, it's just whatever. You're dissing God, which is okay, because that's the title, not his name, the closest pronunciation we have, originally we thought it was Jehovah.

Preston Meyer  1:05:16

Yes, as long time English scholars, we're committed to Jehovah.

Katie Dooley  1:05:19

And now we think it's closer to your way. So you've probably heard both if you're moderately interested in religion, which I presume you are, because you're listening to this podcast. So Jehovah is as the older one. But now we agree upon air quotes. Yahweh

Preston Meyer  1:05:36

is pretty widely used right now. Yeah, there's still argument on whether or not that w should have been a V like it was in earlier English texts. But everybody who is at all concerned with the actual Hebrew alphabet knows that the EO does not make a J sound. The J is a weird detail of Western Europe English,

Katie Dooley  1:06:01

what so even Yehovah would be closer than

Preston Meyer  1:06:05

Jehovah is definitely more carry more correct than Jehovah. But there's some pretty old texts in in Greek that look like they're saying Yehovah. So there will probably always be a huge disagreement on the pronunciation of the name because every now and that's, it's nice that Greek uses vowels and old Hebrew. You we've added vowels since then, to that text. So once you said about the word being taken out of the Bible, kind of true, the practice of reading the the Hebrew Bible, you would substitute a different word, instead of saying, the name of God. Usually, when you see it in print, it will be replaced with Lord as the Greek Septuagint, the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, straight up did cut the word that was the name of God, and replaced it with key, which is Lord, in almost every instance, which is a big, I think it's the reason why the King James version only says the name of God, two or three times instead of replacing every time with Lord, and the stone edition of the Tanakh that I have replaces it with Hashem, which is just a Hebrew word that means the name, which is perfectly reasonable, and lets you know that it wasn't saying, Lord, because there's also plenty of times where it's straight up uses the Hebrew word for Lord in the old test in the Hebrew Bible. So using Hashem avoids an awful lot of ambiguity, I guess. It's kind of a nifty thing. That's my field. Before I started going to school, I was actually a translator for biblical texts. So So field where I've got a little bit of passion and a fair bit of experience.

Katie Dooley  1:08:05

And that's why I trust you. Good enough for me.

Preston Meyer  1:08:11

My degree, but I actually validates work doesn't mean anything. It's the experience I had without any proper edge. Sounds good.

Katie Dooley  1:08:21

I know you keep me on the straight and narrow. I try. A few things I think are true and might not actually be. I do my best. Yeah, just what

Preston Meyer  1:08:31

you said was mostly true. There was just a little detail it was requiring a little tweaking, that's all.

Katie Dooley  1:08:39

So um, unfortunately, to wrap up this episode, we're gonna get a little dark and gloomy, more modern history. I don't think we can talk about Judaism without talking about the Holocaust. But we're over an hour into recording so don't so we will do a full episode on the Holocaust and anti semitism and how the history of anti semitism, which has been around for a long time, far, far longer than when the Holocaust happened. So they my research has said anywhere between six and 11 million Jewish people died during the Holocaust. And just recently, like in the last 10 years, their population has finally recovered. So it's back to pre World War two levels. It is still the smallest of Abrahamic religions with about 16 million, observant whereas Islam and Christianity are in the billions of people.

Preston Meyer  1:09:40

Yeah. There's more Mormons, according to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints official records than there are Jews according to these estimates. Now, of course, the number of Mormons is a lot smaller than reported numbers just because you've got loads of people who On the box drawing, and then literally never showed up to church again.

Katie Dooley  1:10:03

So the Holocaust, for lack of a better word was interesting.

Preston Meyer  1:10:11

It was

Katie Dooley  1:10:13

because it's Judaism is interesting because there is this sort of blend of Is it a race? Or is it a religion, and the Holocaust definitely affected the Jewish race, which I don't like to say because because it is very much a religion, they were targeted because of their race, their race. And Judaism, again, is unique in the Abrahamic religions, because it's not Evangelical, they don't actively recruit, it's very hard to join, you can join and there are Jewish people of all races, but because like I said, they don't actively recruit. And it's passed down from mother to her children kind of formed along racial lines, just like Christianity is predominantly white. And Islam is kind of Arabic and Middle Eastern, Far Eastern North African, they were hauled off Hitler and the Nazis were trying to exterminate the Jewish race. So they didn't care if you're Orthodox, or reform. If you had any air quotes Jewish blood in you,

Preston Meyer  1:11:24

you're part of the master race, you weren't any good, which is super weird to me. Honestly, if you want to create the master race, or Yeah, to create a master race, you don't pick an existing race, every, all of the people on this planet suck to one degree or another, let's be real. As groups, we definitely suck, look at the way we treat each other, right. But to create a master race, you need to amalgamate all of the best parts of all of the different races, for example, all of the fastest sprinters for as long as I can remember, Kenyan, Kenyan, or at least in that neighborhood of Africa. So maybe the master race should be at least a little bit darker. We need to be better runners. I say we that's wildly terrible. Because I definitely don't fit into this category of what I've just described as what would be the master race.

Katie Dooley  1:12:24

Answer on some Dutch because they're so tall. Sure. Yeah. Love that. Those are the off the top my head.

Preston Meyer  1:12:34

So just Kenyans there.

Katie Dooley  1:12:38

So there we go. Kenyans are the perfect done.

Preston Meyer  1:12:46

Oh, I hope we haven't caused any of our parishioners to make plans on genocide, that would be a problem. And I claim no credit or responsibility for the actions of other people.

Katie Dooley  1:13:05

See, we laugh through difficult things like you

Preston Meyer  1:13:08

have to sometimes don't laugh about the Holocaust, but find a reason to laugh through the suffering, you're gonna be healthier.

Katie Dooley  1:13:18

I mean, I don't know how much there is to touch on, especially in this overview episode, sort of the religious aspect of the Holocaust. Besides that, they were exterminated at a very high rate. I know that there are some lasting effects. Like I said, population has just recovered. But

Preston Meyer  1:13:41

thanks. So the First and Second World Wars, Israel has a homeland again, thanks to the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. England took over Palestine, it was called British Palestine for a while, and then in the 40s. So I want to say I could be wrong. It might have been later, the Queen said this land, or actually, realistically, it totally could have been just the Prime Minister. But I feel like the queen had to sign off on this and she's a greater authority. So I like to give her credit. Either way, British Palestine was made into a new nation of Israel, more or less upon the historical boundaries of what we just kind of accept old Israel was. And then you got Jordan and Lebanon and West Bank. There we go. And so these nations are built up and finally gave Israel a home again, which was nice because they had been having a pretty hard time there. Since the time of the Crusades, Christians and Muslims have been fighting over that land for a long time and now still

Katie Dooley  1:14:47

fighting. Yeah, the ISRAEL PALESTINE issue might actually be an episode. Yeah,

Preston Meyer  1:14:52

I don't really want to take up our time for this topic. What will definitely be a political discussion I

Katie Dooley  1:15:01

don't know what side you're talking about, before we go on air, no

Preston Meyer  1:15:05

surprise on that one. Do you think you'll be pleasantly surprised when we agree on a lot of things? So

Katie Dooley  1:15:13

yes, the nation of Israel was created. One ramification I have heard is that in more orthodox families, especially families that and I mean, it's not like the the Holocaust was that long ago, but families that remember either parents or grandparents going through it, there is a lot of pressure to stay in Judaism, we pay for faith to dare leave. Yeah. So in some cases bordering on cult, like pressure to stay, obviously not. That's not a generalization on all Jewish people are like that. But that is interesting. That doesn't, it's a thing that happens and almost understandably so. Right. Watching your family die and be torn apart over a religion. And that sounds like I'm not really into it. Right? Yeah, though, that's definitely some generational trauma that they still have to heal from.

Preston Meyer  1:16:11

Yeah, it's a crappy time in history. Yeah. I mean, it's crappy time in history today, too, but it's different.

Katie Dooley  1:16:21

How can we tie up this episode in a bow is covered the Hebrew Bible, and stories from what we've covered?

Preston Meyer  1:16:28

Should we finish with the end? So one of the things that fascinates me about Judaism is the the eschatology, the the understanding of the end of the world. The Judaism is not monolithic. And, as we discussed earlier, rabbis argue amongst themselves all the time as part of their religious observance, almost, that there's so much discussion and no unanimous, accepted conclusion about what is after this life. Jewish afterlife is ambiguous and cloudy, like we nobody really can say with confidence, what it is, the Bible in the Old Testament doesn't give clear statements. The Hebrew bible talks about the immortality of the soul, and a judgment. And there's a held high place, often called Ghana, and a paradise. And there's of course, the rebuilding of the temple, which is not actually strictly associated with it, but is kind of connected.

Katie Dooley  1:17:47

Will the temple have to be built before the end of the world? Yes. Okay. So then the world won't come until the

Preston Meyer  1:17:53

temples, right. So that's the promise that scattered Israel will be reunited, the temple will be rebuilt. And Jews and Christians alike celebrate that Israel has its homeland again. Of course, there are exceptions to that celebration. But that is one of those landmarks for the end of the world is this has to happen before that can and find out what's going on in the next life is still a mystery. There's plenty of religions who will tell you specifically like this is what your day to day agenda is going to be in the next life. For many Christians, it's you're going to sing in a choir forever, the end, which sounds like not a thrill. But

Katie Dooley  1:18:39

y'all haven't heard my singing voice that would be for every one else around me, unless I get an upgraded set of vocal cords.

Preston Meyer  1:18:47

Right? There are plenty of Jews who subscribe to a reasonably common Greek belief that you you'll be a farmer in the next life and you'll be free to take care of your own self and family for eternity. Which sounds kind of

Katie Dooley  1:19:02

cool. Okay, but

Preston Meyer  1:19:05

there's, there's no real hard dogma on that, which is kind of cool. Like, you go ask a rabbi, what happens after this life? Most of them really say, What do you think? Let give me some fuels. So I can argue with the other rabbis. Yeah, that's, it's kind of nice. The theology of Judaism is not really terribly expansive. And like, like I mentioned, there's a handful of things that are mentioned and there's not a lot of certainty on how they even relate to each other. Like between paradise and Ghana and judgment. There's seems to be what should be reasonably obvious gum way to interpret that. But there's also an ambiguity there too. And everything else about is like, we just don't know, we know there's a good place, we know that there's a bad place. That's it. We don't know what the good is. We don't know what the bad is. It's probably not a tire fire.

Katie Dooley  1:20:21

I mean, that's, that's refreshing. Right? I like that. I like when people can admit that they don't know. Yeah. So

Preston Meyer  1:20:28

as opposed to the Catholic tradition, which relies heavily on Dante's Inferno, which is, I mean, it was fiction.

Katie Dooley  1:20:39

We'll get to that. We'll get to that in our next episode. So if you want to get in contact with us, send us if you have things you want to learn and comments, suggestions, even corrections or hate mail, holy watermelon [email protected]. And we have our Instagram up and running at Holy watermelon pod. We will be announcing new episodes, and some other really cool social media content on their phones. Give us a follow and

Preston Meyer  1:21:09

share us with your friends.

Katie Dooley  1:21:10

Oh yeah, five stars. Share with your friends. Check us out where wherever you listen to your punk

Preston Meyer  1:21:15

by the late Middle Ages. Thanks so much for listening.

We are discussing the war on Christmas! Or the lack of one... 
Let's talk about why December is a little more secular, and a little more globalist, than you might realize.

In this episode, we cover many of the holidays that take place in December including Kwanzaa and Hanukkah. Because there are literally dozens of holidays happening this time of year, Happy Holidays are more appropriate and acknowledge religious and cultural diversity. 

Did you know there are Christians that don't celebrate Christmas? While you may feel there is a "war on Christmas" against the Christian faith, there are subsets of Christianity that don't recognize the holiday. 

An umbrella term like "Happy Holidays" welcomes people from all backgrounds and doesn't assume that all white people are Christians (like our resident atheist, Katie). It's not about not celebrating Christmas, it's about recognizing that people come from different walks of life.

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Preston Meyer  00:09

Happy holidays.

Katie Dooley  00:19

Or laughing already. So bad. And welcome to another episode of the holly watermelon Podcast. I'm Katie. I'm Preston. And today, this is our last episode of 2020.

Preston Meyer  00:32

Oh man, I hope the new year is something good.

Katie Dooley  00:34

And I'll just say right now we're going to take three, three weeks between episodes instead of two. But we will see you all in 2021. And hope it's better than 2020. But today, I think this is going to be our most controversial episode yet. six episodes in but

Preston Meyer  00:56

yeah, I mean, it's a low bar, but we're gonna, we're gonna either launch right over it or fall right into it.

Katie Dooley  01:04

So today, we're talking about Happy Holidays, versus Merry Christmas, or on Christmas. I, this isn't all going to be about the war on Christmas, but it's definitely part of our conversation today. And I think why Happy Holidays should be everyone's preferred term.

Preston Meyer  01:29

Honestly, I don't think it needs to be a preferred term. But if you're the person who shouts at other people for saying Happy Holidays, you're the bad guy.

Katie Dooley  01:39

Yeah. Um, so there's a few reasons. I think this and we're, I think we'll just dive right into though.

Preston Meyer  01:47

All right. So what else is going on in December?

Katie Dooley  01:50

I mean, there's a lot going on December, which is why I don't have which is why like, have holiday.

Preston Meyer  01:57

Nice and generic, nice

Katie Dooley  01:59

engineer. So we have a Buddhist holiday called Bodhi day. We have a Jewish holiday called Hanukkah,

Preston Meyer  02:07

which isn't always in December, but it is this year. Also.

Katie Dooley  02:11

Diwali this year was in November, but I think it can fall in December as well. That sounds right. Also, the the Muslim calendar changes every year. So it's kind of good. It doesn't fall this year. But you could definitely fall in December. We have Kwanzaa which is an African American. It's not a religious holiday particular but it does fall in December. We have Zorro Astron holiday called Zara thoughts. D so we have to Hindu holidays Danu sense grantee and Geeta J on TV.

Preston Meyer  02:51

I love listening to you say these things, but I know that I wouldn't pronounce them any better.

Katie Dooley  02:58

Yeah, please throw me sure comment with the phonetics farm, you

Preston Meyer  03:04

send us your homemade MP threes and, or

Katie Dooley  03:08

whatever. And then we also have other Christian or near Christian holidays. So we have you all we have St. Nicholas stay. Epiphany happens in January, but it's kind of related. So there's a lot going on. And there's actually a lot going on all year round. But this is what we call the holiday season. Because

Preston Meyer  03:27

gay white, Christian centric American culture. We focus on one thing, we have one bank holiday in December, and that's December 25. For the white Christians, because let's be real, nobody was thinking about black Christians when they plan this.

Katie Dooley  03:46

And then of course, there's people who don't prescribe anything.

Preston Meyer  03:50

Absolutely loads of atheists who tend to celebrate bank holidays, which include Christmas.

Katie Dooley  03:59

It's always get saw or allowed. Right?

Preston Meyer  04:02

At least as a bank holiday almost every month. I think except for June. Think so. Yeah. Oh, bank

Katie Dooley  04:12

holidays are great religions.

Preston Meyer  04:15

I think we talked about it earlier in an earlier episode about how there's a faith system built up around money a little bit. So bank holidays doesn't even sound that weird in this context.

Katie Dooley  04:28

So I think that's one of my biggest reasons for Happy Holidays. I will say Merry Christmas on Christmas, but if I don't know someone personally, I will say happy holidays because I don't know what they prescribe to. They prescribed anything at all.

Preston Meyer  04:43

Yeah, I'll say Merry Christmas to the people that I know celebrate Christmas. I'll often say Happy Hanukkah to the people that know that I celebrate Hanukkah, which is irregular. That as a Christian, I celebrate Hanukkah.

Katie Dooley  04:59

Party You actually have the honor, right?

Preston Meyer  05:01

I mean, it's the greeting for the holiday. It just makes sense that it's if you know you're there for a specific event, you're going to remember that and say the appropriate greeting. I think, like when you show up to a person's birthday party, even if it's not on their birthday, you're usually going to say Happy Birthday like that. Because

Katie Dooley  05:19

it's true. Right? And with that being said, I am conscientious of I tried to be conscientious, I definitely don't know. 10 for 10, for sure, but when I know it is coming up, I will try to make a point of texting my Muslim friends Happy Eid. He because he changes like forget, Monica. Fortunately, because you celebrate it. I know it's coming up on a text my handful of Jewish friends, Happy Hanukkah, and they all wish me Merry Christmas in return. Right? So

Preston Meyer  05:53

it's almost like being a good friend works out. Yeah, it's frustrating that there's so much what appears to be contention around the holidays, like, there's the obvious Christmas is super stressful. And people want to make that as positive as possible. And so to do that, they start fights over what to call it and how to greet each other.

Katie Dooley  06:22

And we're going to move into I guess this is probably a good segue move into how Christian Christmas is. And even the fact that there were there are the fact that there are non believers that celebrate Christmas, like myself, that some of these things can get really contentious and exclusive, exclusive. There's gatekeepers everywhere. Absolutely. So we were we were talking before we hit play. A great example is we have a relative we have a relative that, you know, this time of the year, the social media posts are coming Jesus is the reason for the season, like how can you celebrate Christmas if you don't believe in Christ, and it's a very exclusive story for me, part of me was like, I should just not show up on your because they're presuming everyone believes is as a Christian. And yeah, I think that's counterintuitive to what this time of year is about, I think it should be about inclusion and whether you believe that Jesus is the Son of God or not, shouldn't exclude you from whatever your celebrations look like, whether that's Yeah, anything from Hanukkah, Kwanzaa to Christmas,

Preston Meyer  07:51

it's, it's weird that the secular culture that we've built up in North America finds its roots very strongly in Protestant Christianity. Protestant schools are what turned into our public schools for most of North America. Occasionally, it's actually Catholic schools and started the public schools. But mostly it's the Protestants. And so that Protestant morality in the Protestant worldview is the primary source of the way the secularist movement is built up. And so Christmas went from I think that was very Christian where most families when they celebrate Christmas, they've read from the one of the Gospels, usually Luke, sometimes Matthew, depending on your family and your preference. And there's very few people to do that. I think in my own family, we've done that three times. I and my family's occasionally sometimes pretty into their face, at least a little bit. And that

Katie Dooley  09:03

didn't sound wishy washy at all pressed and occasionally, sometimes at least a little bit.

Preston Meyer  09:09

My family is wonderful. But we're not consistent on our Christmas traditions at all. And I think that's actually probably pretty normal for the population at large. There's a handful of things that we usually do like a gift exchange, which is not specifically tied to Christianity at all. People give gifts that's what you do when you like people pretty often money for Christmas, Preston odd just doesn't have to be for Christmas.

Katie Dooley  09:39

December Preston, that's a secret.

Preston Meyer  09:43

But there is also a narrative in the Bible for Christmas gift giving, which is a lot of the justification for the hyper Christian theists Christmas movement, defenders This sounds like a weird set of words to jumble all up together. But I think you follow that if if you're really committed to the biblical Christmas gift giving still is okay. And so you can't get mad at the people who do it, which is kind of nice. Interesting.

Katie Dooley  10:17

I think it's, it's funny that you say that, you know, traditionally people had, you know, celebrate Christmas as a Christian holiday. I know here in North America, like Christmas and Easter, the two times churches are filled. Because everyone feels like they need to be there on those days.

Preston Meyer  10:36

And that's where the church is, makes it real money.

Katie Dooley  10:39

So my mom was raised Ukrainian Orthodox, and I think it's an interesting take on North America and North American religion and how they celebrate Christmas. But in their house, they called December 25, Canadian Christmas, and that's where you would give gifts and Santa would come. And then they would call January 6, or epiphany, Ukrainian Christmas, and that's where you went to church and the priest would come and it was this very religious thing. So I think that's an interesting take on it.

Preston Meyer  11:07

Right? There's there's my church Christmas and my secular and my

Katie Dooley  11:11

consumerism Christmas. Yeah. So I don't know what that says about Christmas in North America. But I think we can agree that it's not particularly Christian anymore.

Preston Meyer  11:24

Right. I went to Ukrainian school for several years growing up. And I thought it was really funny that there was a joke going around fairly often that the Ukrainians, the Ukrainians, were the smart ones. They had Christmas once everything was on sale. So wonderful. So

Katie Dooley  11:43

I, this always bothers me, and I know it's a tangent for episode. So we have Christmas Day, the 25th, which is the birth of Jesus. And then January 6 is epiphany, which is where Jesus became known to the wise men, or Ukrainian Christmas in the Orthodox Church. Those, everyone, those are the 12 days of Christmas. Those are the 12 days of Christmas, not the 12 days leading up to Christmas, not December 13. That's what those are not the 12 days of Christmas. But the 12 days of Christmas, are from December 25 to January 6, which is epiphany, or 12th. Night, if you're a Shakespeare fan, 12th night is epiphany. And they're traditionally that's the celebration, where you get a dress up and masquerade and be silly, PSA, those are the 12 days of Christmas. If you advertise anything in your business as the holidays Christmas before Christmas, I'll be mad at you.

Preston Meyer  12:40

I think it's really kind of funky. Thinking about how calendars changed to like that the Orthodox Christmas, not just Ukrainian, but the whole orthodox group. They stuck to the Julian calendar when we progressed on to the Gregorian calendar. And so we adjusted their calendars. And we said, Okay, you guys, when you aren't going to adjust your liturgical calendar, we that pushes your Christmas into January. So Haha, you have to remember when your Christmas is now.

Katie Dooley  13:14

Well, and this is I guess this is a good point to make for how Christians Christmas is like theirs their I don't think there's any proof that Jesus was actually born zero on December 21, a long standing calendar changes. And I think there have been at least two calendar changes since his birth. I read years ago, that the closest estimate that they have to Jesus's birthday is actually put it in April.

Preston Meyer  13:43

It's so being a person who worked intimately with the translation of the Gospels, most especially, it was really interesting to go through and really spend a lot of time with the stories and look at the words and whatnot. And the narrative and understanding where especially Luke is getting his information. He's the one who tells us about the census that everyone had to go and be taxed. And that's why Mary and Joseph went to Bethlehem. There's no historical proof that there was a census in the years surrounding when it's likely Jesus was born, which makes it a weird thing to have Luke put in the book. But it's entirely possible that he was right. And we just don't have the historical data. But even then, that's not why they travelled to Bethlehem. It was almost certainly a wise move on the part of the government to count people when they have already gathered for a thing. People don't like the government. They're not going to go way out of their way, especially traveling 100 Miles don't get to help the government that don't like this, that's not going to happen. Look at the way people are behaving this year. And people We're not that different 2000 years ago. So I believe they were traveling for already existent Big Deal holiday, a reason when they were expected to go to the temple in Jerusalem, from all over Israel, or Judea and Galilee. And so I feel inclined to say very confidently It was March or April, for the Passover of that year. And of course, the story gets more exciting as Mary is not welcome in the family home because she's pregnant. Joseph says it's not his. Yeah. But that's not where we're diving into the depths of the story. That's not our point today.

Katie Dooley  15:46

I know there are also a lot of other religious figures that have prominent dates in

Preston Meyer  15:52

December, we were looking at one of one of the dates you mentioned, celebrating in this year was the death of a major figure. And now I can't remember what it was or who it was. I was that Xero sauce. Yes, it was definitely. That's our Astromon. Yes, the death of Zarathustra or tsar? Alas, Alastor. You're allowed to say either. Okay, unless I'm way wrong on this, that two names for the same guy based on linguistic differences. Yeah, so birth of Jesus death czar. Alastor. And there are plenty of religious theorists who think that there's some important connections between the development of Christianity and the influence of source Austrian ism. There's

Katie Dooley  16:43

also I mean, there's also we can't ignore the winter solstice is right around this time.

Preston Meyer  16:48

Absolutely. You will, is something that's kind of interesting, I only found out in my study in preparation for this episode of our podcast that we assume a lot of about the origins of you'll and the Yule Log. But we actually have no concrete proof that it predates the Christian tradition. Even though everybody says that it does. Everybody's like, yeah, it comes from the Germanic paganism. And we don't have any evidence for that. But everybody as far back as we can find is like no, this thing that's been going on for a long time, a long time.

Katie Dooley  17:32

It's interesting. You bring up paganism, because there are denominations of Christianity that don't celebrate Christmas, because they believe it's a pagan holidays. Yes. Back to like, we should just say happy holidays.

Preston Meyer  17:48

Christmas isn't exclusively Christian,

Katie Dooley  17:51

not even across the board. So what are some of the reasons that these denominations think it's a pagan holiday? Well,

Preston Meyer  18:00

my favorite is the idea that, Oh, well, Christmas must be Jesus birthday. We've said it often enough throughout history, that that's kind of the focal point of the whole deal. And people like to Jehovah's Witnesses and Christadelphians, whether we've mentioned before, in passing, they both are very opposed to Christmas. Jehovah's Witnesses are also really against Easter. I don't know if that's true about Christadelphians.

Katie Dooley  18:31

I know Jehovah Witnesses celebrate a version of Issei. They call it Passover,

Preston Meyer  18:35

because they call it Easter pagan, because the name is from them.

Katie Dooley  18:44

I know what you're talking about, to have to Google it.

Preston Meyer  18:49

It's bothering me that I can't remember how it was pronounced in that part of the world. You got a star, you've got a star. You've got estar. I don't even know if I pronounced that right. But that's the way it looks like I'm supposed to say it. There's a lot of different gods in that area have very similar names are probably the same person, just cultural shift in the their names. Kind of weird that there's a lot of contention on this part of it as pagan for Easter. But for Christmas, they're just like, No, the whole thing is pagan. Even though there's all the things you need in the Bible to say it's okay to celebrate Christmas. I

Katie Dooley  19:29

read one thing. Is it in your notes? Maybe that Jehovah Witnesses don't celebrate Christmas because they don't celebrate birthdays? Yes. So it's because it's Jesus's birthday. No, and they don't celebrate birthdays. Yeah, and I know Christadelphians don't celebrate birthdays. But I don't know. I don't think that's a reasoning for Christmas. I think it's because Christmas is pagan that might

Preston Meyer  19:51

be like we have to dig a little deeper into that one. My favorite thing about the whole birthday thing though, is so don't celebrate birthday. Is because birthdays are basically the pagan thing that you do to honor the gods. So you honor your God by celebrating his birthday cheeses. The God of the Christians can't celebrate his birthday. No.

20:18

No

Preston Meyer  20:19

birthday either. It's just a little weird. I wouldn't call it a double standard or anything terribly negative. It just feels weird to me that

Katie Dooley  20:31

the Son of God himself is a lot of birthday, right?

Preston Meyer  20:34

Well, you know what, though, that actually does make a little bit of sense. For Jehovah's Witnesses. Jesus isn't God. He's the Son of God, but He is not God. We talked about this before in our monotheism versus Heno theism versus polytheism. For Christadelphians and Jehovah's Witnesses, there is one God and Jesus is the Son of God who is not divine himself at all. So actually, that feels like that lines. Not celebrating the birthday of ourselves. Look at that. You caught us right here figuring it out in real time.

Katie Dooley  21:12

Some other very pagan things Santa Claus and his elves that's checks the elves.

Preston Meyer  21:19

Okay. And there's no reason that either one of them would be in the Bible. Let's be real. The elves definitely pagan. There's no argument against that. That's very non Christian, very

Katie Dooley  21:31

isolated.

Preston Meyer  21:32

Yes. However, could Old St. Nicholas is Yeah, he is a Christian person. He was around about 300 ad ish.

Katie Dooley  21:45

Really good. Katie, St. Nicholas was safe.

Preston Meyer  21:50

What a champ. At least you can keep up. And so he was known for giving gifts secretly to children all the time. He also used to beat people up when they abused children, which is a really fun part of the story that's been shifted a little over to Black Pete I think. Yeah. So Black Pete? Oh, yeah. Having St. Nicholas is slave Black Pete. And, like, a little piece of me wants to just call him, Peter. But there's plenty of reasons not to make it more ambiguous and Christianity. And Black Pete is keeping the information alive. Well, hopefully we've shifted our attitudes. I really hope we've shifted our attitude. I

Katie Dooley  22:40

mean, I was reading last Christmas, some contention over, like Peter and like, fair enough, but we

Preston Meyer  22:48

still have people doing blackface. Yeah, like Peter, cuz there's, that's I mean, we don't have a shortage of black people in our communities that we could say, Hey, you want to be Pete for our Christmas thing this year? Which, I mean, asking somebody does feel a little racist, but it's a lot better than asking your white friend. Hey, we Black Pete.

Katie Dooley  23:11

My mom was beaten by Black Peter. Yeah. Nice. Germany. Cool. Yeah.

Preston Meyer  23:19

I like crumpets a little bit better. Because he's not human. It's less racist. Yeah. I mean, this is obviously awfulness to compass. Oh, but it's not properly racist. As far as I know. Unless there's some backstory there that I don't know that compass is actually one of those horrible, deformed stories of a Jew out to hurt Christians, which is one of those stories that got around a lot.

Katie Dooley  23:46

So back to Santa Claus. Yeah, very popular Christmas tradition that isn't Christian at all.

Preston Meyer  23:52

Yeah, he's just giving gifts not because of any particular calendar necessity, but because he was a nice guy. He showed his love to the kids who needed help, or at least needed some real concrete affection in a very familiar way. So over the course of time, St. Nicholas, St. Nicholas died on us and we kept them alive, kept alive St. Nicholas days early December. So somewhere these dates kind of merged. Yeah, we got lazy and we decided we can only have one bank holiday in December. So

Katie Dooley  24:29

is that lasers that industry has to keep us working? See?

Preston Meyer  24:32

That's a real philosophical question. I like it. I don't have an answer for it. But I like the question.

Katie Dooley  24:43

We have other Christmas traditions that are not Christian. Absolutely. The Christmas tree is not actually a Christian. I

Preston Meyer  24:50

don't think there's any reason to think that it's a Christian thing. Interestingly enough, there's a couple of passages in the Hebrew Bible, specifically warning against using trees in worship, King Josiah did a lot of reforms to the religion right before the downfall of the nation and the exile. And with some of those included tearing down groves that they had set up near the shrines all across the nation that ended up being associated with ASHA, who we talked about before the the mother goddess worshipped in Israel. And King Josiah had these torn down with fear that the worship was wildly inappropriate and sort of worship with trees and that being contrary to approved worship, has the whole philosophy seems to have been dropped with what I believe as a German tradition initially, yes, trees are German.

Katie Dooley  25:55

While the German

Preston Meyer  25:59

they gave us Krampus and Christmas trees, one of those things is far more pleasant than the other. There's definitely loads of hyper localized Christmas traditions. Oh, absolutely.

Katie Dooley  26:09

My dear friend is big on the gnomes as popular in Scandinavia, she has gnomes all over her house.

Preston Meyer  26:18

That sounds great.

Katie Dooley  26:19

That's the only one I can think of. I know there's I know there's more. I

Preston Meyer  26:23

have a couple of friends that collect gnomes. I don't know if they do it specifically for Christmas. But I know that they have Christmas themed gnomes in addition to the rest of their collection. There. Oh, gingerbread houses? I doubt it. I think it's just Germans.

Katie Dooley  26:39

Germans know how to party. Right? Yeah,

Preston Meyer  26:43

it's just a fun thing to do to keep the kids busy. And you know, if a kid can have a chance to make a mess and not get screamed at you know, he's going to jump on it. So gingerbread houses all away. I think I've only ever built three gingerbread houses my whole life. Though it didn't help us here. I did help with a giant gingerbread Colosseum a few years ago. That was so good fun. We didn't have a lot, but it helped a tiny little bit.

Katie Dooley  27:07

We were gifted a gingerbread house two years ago because we wanted a house. And we couldn't get one. Yeah. And the year we were gifted it. We were gifted it at Christmas. So I didn't make it. And I was like, Oh, don't build it next year. And then last year, I was so busy. I didn't make it. So it's still obviously we're not going to eat it. But I still have a gingerbread kit and I'm gonna make it.

Preston Meyer  27:27

Let's be honest, most gingerbread houses you don't eat Cheerio. It's a waste to candy when the candy isn't gonna go bad, but you're not going to eat it after you've put it on.

Katie Dooley  27:37

You always plaster can lead a nibble. Otherwise,

Preston Meyer  27:40

it'd be hugely depressing. But the gingerbread itself very seldom is eaten now.

Katie Dooley  27:45

So maybe let's talk about what the war on Christmas is some examples where it originates from and how because my goal and our goal for the podcast is to mind

Preston Meyer  28:01

the word lottery is to help people understand that there is no war on Christmas

Katie Dooley  28:09

and and maybe why if you don't know you should they happy holidays or you should venture to find out what they what they do you celebrate.

Preston Meyer  28:18

Yeah, absolutely. What is this? If you have friends who don't celebrate Christmas, saying Merry Christmas to them is a little bit weird. Not bad, just weird.

Katie Dooley  28:30

Well, I I will always say thank you. Right. And I think most people would, but again, it's you know, how do we bridge these gaps between people and you know, whether maybe with a stranger you don't give a shit but with your friends like to make that effort to say Happy Hanukkah or Happy Eid or Happy Kwanzaa I think means a lot. And I think that's why is when you don't know

Preston Meyer  28:57

that's, as far as I can tell. The reason why we've shifted towards saying Happy Holidays, is that if you as a Jewish person, keep getting people saying Merry Christmas to you, you feel a little bit anonymous, like nobody recognizes you, and that you're almost invisible in a couple of painful ways, I think. And this the big move to say happy holidays to people is primarily pushed in the retail industry. That's as far as I can tell where it really started coming from because you want people to feel welcome in your shops. Oh, yeah, rat well are all December long. Yeah. And so I mean, even though you're obviously going to be selling Christmas stuff, if you're selling things almost always. There's the need to have all of your customers feel welcome. You don't want to have that slightly alienating anonymity of you have no idea who I am. If you're wishing me a happy this thing that I'll celebrate Yeah, even though usually, like, say Merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah to somebody who doesn't celebrate those things, who usually get a thank you and probably the same greeting in return, which, I mean, if I say Merry Christmas to you, you can assume that I celebrate Christmas so you can safely say back to me Merry Christmas presents. But if I refuse to say Happy Hanukkah to a Jewish friend or neighbor or somebody who I know is Jewish, your deck? Absolutely. I'm a bad neighbor and not a friend. And that's, oh, super frustrating.

Katie Dooley  30:39

Yeah, I mean, I'm sure there's people out there who think we're being, you know, maybe overly politically correct. But like you said, as an atheist who celebrates Christmas Yeah. To hear family say, Well, if you don't believe you shouldn't be here is exactly that. And I'm not even in a minority. Right? I'm, I'm a white font, we'll call it a faux Christian, right? Because I celebrate Christmas, I sell, celebrate Easter. I don't go to church. I'll eat candy at both instances, is basically what I do. And spend time with family. Yeah, some people say, you know, whatever is definitely isolating. So I can't imagine if you're especially Jewish. In Canada in particular, there's honestly the percentage of the population that's Jewish is very small. It's very small worldwide. I know, two Jewish people. And both are nonpracticing. I can't imagine how frustrating it would be to not see yourself represented in the world, especially when it's such a big holiday in your religion,

Preston Meyer  31:55

right? Yeah, Hanukkah is a big deal. Like it's not one of the High Holy Days, but it's kind of a big deal. And it's kind of a bummer that it can go unrecognized. So often, it's very seriously overshadowed by the far more popular Christmas. But if you go into a store and you see a white person, so often now we assume all they must be Christian, we can wish them Merry Christmas, if you see a dark skinned dude with great bone structure. It's not fair to to assume that they don't celebrate Christmas.

Katie Dooley  32:30

Absolutely. Well, we talked about this in our last episode about globalism. And I know white Muslims. I know. Like not just like, pale Arabic people. I know what Muslims, I was gonna say Caucasian, but Arab Arab people are actually Caucasian. Yeah, I know, North American white folk that are Muslim. And I mean, India is a great example of as a nation and you obviously we have a lot of immigrants and second generation people from India, in Canada. India is like very evenly split between Hindu, Muslim and Christian. So you can't I had a job where I worked with three people from India, one was Muslim, one was Hindu. And one was Christian. Nice. And yes, absolutely. It's like, how do you can't assume, right? But so where did the war on Christmas come from? Is this Is it legitimate precedent? You already said? It was bullshit?

Preston Meyer  33:30

Yeah, no, it's It's nonsense. There's no war on Christmas employers, as far as I can tell, based on observation, and I'm going to be honest, not a lot of in depth study, but plenty of observation on just culture and, and reading plenty of employers handbooks, working in retail, the drive to say happy holidays, instead of Merry Christmas is just to make sure that nobody feels like they're being left out a little bit. But you used a word that has gone out of my mind. I said, isolated, isolated. Yeah. I like that word. That it's, it feels also a little bit like you're being pushed to do a thing that you haven't made any commitment to do. I have no interest in doing pretty often. The the need to make a nation homogenized is a problem. Yeah, unity is great. But Unity is a lot better when it can also include diversity. Absolutely.

Katie Dooley  34:38

Well, that's where moderation is important. I think it's also hard to say, especially in North America, that there's a war on Christmas when Christianity rain. Supre right. Maybe in Saudi Arabia, there's a war on Christmas. I don't doubt it. I doubt it. I don't know. But when it's Christianity is the largest religion in the world. It's the most prescribed your religion in the world. And definitely that is the case in North America. Oh, yeah. You Christians have a persecution complex. They said, Yeah,

Preston Meyer  35:12

it's true. I mean, we started off our history in the first century, heavily persecuted, there was this cult that came out of the Jewish religion, and hated by the Jews, because they weren't following the rules. And hated by the Romans, because they wouldn't worship the Roman gods. And it took a couple 100 years, and then the Christians ended up on top a couple 100 years went by, and I almost got squished entirely by the Muslims, and then came back and just leaned real hard on that persecution thing ever since. What's really frustrating, and we'll get into it later on talking about dumb Christian sects. Chris, Christians have been persecuted by other Christians, way more than anybody outside of Christianity has disputed Christians.

Katie Dooley  36:05

I'm reading a book right now. It's not related. Wow. Yeah. So it's about Queen Elizabeth the first and her reign, and there's leave, there's been a few lines in it, where they're like, Oh, God was Protestant today, or God was Catholic today. And I was like, it's like, it makes me laugh. And I mean, it kind of comes back to like prayer and worship and whatever. But it's like, they worship the same God. And he, you know, obviously, Catholics and Protestants are fighting Oh, he decides one side show in one day and the next slide show in the other day. So I like that God was Protestant today, or God was Catholic today.

Preston Meyer  36:43

Make sense? If you want to believe that all of your victories and losses are decided by God. I mean, causes some issues when you look at the Greater theology and cosmology. But it's, it's an easy enough crush for an awful lot of people to lean on.

Katie Dooley  37:00

So I What would you say to someone as a Christian yourself? Who might feel like Christmas is under threat to them? You know, when Starbucks makes their takes Christmas trees off their mugs? Or whatever the fuck they do? I don't even know anymore. Like, what would you say to someone who is feeling threatened? Because they think GRAY Like if? How to Yeah, how do you? How do you bring them? Bring them closer? Well,

Preston Meyer  37:34

first, I'd have to start by asking them how they feel that Christmas is threatened. No, I've never heard anybody say it anybody else. You shouldn't celebrate Christmas, which is a weird thing that I've spent plenty of time with Jehovah's Witnesses. And the presentation has always been, we don't celebrate Christmas. Not you shouldn't, which is a really weird position to hear Christians take because most of us are familiar with the Christians who say you shouldn't have abortions. You shouldn't do this. You shouldn't do that. And it gets really tiring. So having these hyper aggressive Jehovah's Witnesses knock on the door, and being aggressive in their approach, but also actually really reasonable in the delivery is really relieving. But yeah, I've I've never heard anybody say, You shouldn't celebrate Christmas. It doesn't feel like there's a war on Christmas.

Katie Dooley  38:34

I have actually had the opposite and my real job when it comes to Christmas cards when you know, what do you want to autumn? And I've heard I've heard a few I've probably heard two or three people say it has to be merry Christmas. None of this happy holidays bullshit. Right? Like it's Christmas. It's Christmas. It's Jesus. It's Jesus birthday.

Preston Meyer  38:57

Well, if that's what you're sending your Christmas cards to fine, but the attitude still sucks. And honestly,

Katie Dooley  39:04

that's what bothers me more is the attitude behind it that just put Merry Christmas on the card because I've definitely done cards where people just like put Merry Christmas on the karma cool. Merry Christmas on the car. But when it's followed by none of this happy holidays bullshit and like you need to watch A Christmas Carol. Which is a completely secular Christmas story right to just so everyone knows I love

Preston Meyer  39:29

I don't remember. Is it any specifically Christian elements in that movie at all? Or well, okay, I see a movie. I've watched several different A Christmas Carol movies. I have not read the book.

Katie Dooley  39:42

I like reading it. I think at the end when he says he's saved. He does say something like having in the saints be praised. But I think that's about as religious as it gets. But it was England when Dickens was the Live, so it would have been a very Christian. Oh, absolutely. I mean, it's still quite a Christian country, the Christian

Preston Meyer  40:04

overtones would have been assumed by the readers for sure.

Katie Dooley  40:08

Do we want to talk about Melania? And the wall, which I think is, I just think this is a funny anecdote.

Preston Meyer  40:16

And it's not even fresh news anymore. But it's new enough, it is this year leading into the preparations for the election.

Katie Dooley  40:24

So I mean, they won't be spending Christmas in the White House

Preston Meyer  40:29

really well. Well, they know it's January 20, is when we got the new president. I guess

Katie Dooley  40:34

that's nice, you know, this house before Chris, right.

Preston Meyer  40:38

But, you know, kicking them out of the house early isn't a huge problem, because Melania didn't want to decorate. She is recorded. And I've read about it. A while ago, back when it was fresh news. I actually didn't bother going and watching the video and hearing the audio until a couple of days ago. Say it out loud press and I have to read it. I know. All right, let's say a word of the First Lady of the United States of America. Melania. Trump actually said and is recorded saying, Who gives a fuck about Christmas stuff and decorations when talking about decorating the White House for Christmas. And CNN and a whole bunch of others blew up with this news that Melania is leading the war on Christmas, which may have been why Georgia voted against Trump this year. I mean, you have to have offended a lot of the Christians who are already worried about a war on Christmas.

Katie Dooley  41:39

Well, and I that's why I think it's interesting. And obviously she didn't know she was being recorded. But I think it's interesting coming from a Republican First Lady, right? When, and every president ever and probably for a long time still is Christian, and especially a Republican. Christian. It was very interesting to hear

Preston Meyer  41:58

you say you say that, but I know most of the presidents were Christian. There's actually a lot of doubt on how Christian Washington was. Donald Trump has been inside a church. I could lose a finger fingers to count.

Katie Dooley  42:18

Yes, but they all have to put on the

Preston Meyer  42:21

facade. Yes. So and if he does belong to a church, how long he has gone to that church? I don't know. And but

Katie Dooley  42:28

this is a another episode for another day. But we will talk about the No True Scotsman fallacy. So I mean, Trump has Christian who ended the No True Scotsman fallacy, right? Like,

Preston Meyer  42:41

he says he's a Christian. So that's all we can do. Yeah.

Katie Dooley  42:45

So, like you said, another discussion on why Westboro Baptist Church are Christian.

Preston Meyer  42:51

Right. Just, er, I guess that's enough. Yeah.

Katie Dooley  42:55

I mean, it has to be at the end of it.

Preston Meyer  43:02

The problem is just leaning into that fallacy bit a little bit. The people who say they are versus the people who act like they are. One MC is a bad name for the other. Oh, absolutely.

Katie Dooley  43:12

But I it goes back to the story you mentioned in their, in their very first episode of the good atheist, right, so any final thoughts?

Preston Meyer  43:23

Just the idea that there's way too many holidays in December, you shouldn't be making assumptions about people that you don't know very well. I have a good handful of Wiccan friends and other pagans and that I hang out with occasionally, Well, honestly, not this year, because this year is sucked there within my circle of friendly contacts. And there's loads going on this month loads to celebrate. Christmas is just one of many options. And there's a tradition that I noticed when I lived in New Jersey for a little while, they put candles up in their windows. I think I've seen like two houses do that here. And I don't think I ever noticed it before I went away. But there's a couple people to do here. And this, this idea of bringing light into the darkest time of the year is kind of nice for Christians. It's very strictly tied to Jesus, Jesus, the light of the world come into the world for Christmas. And a time when we need that light when it's all dark for so much of the day. It's kind of cool, similar, but wildly different tradition among the Jews of Hanukkah. It's hard because ultimately about the rededication of the temple. But there's an awful lot of emphasis on that fight for the liberty to celebrate their religion that led to the dedication of the temple. And then there's the miracle of the oil which is represented in the lampstand and the candlesticks today have more light. And then of course that you will love we mentioned before that there's still arguments about when we started that and who we stole it from. But light is such a big deal. We like fire a lot. Whole lot. Right? That's what makes us different from the apes who are also using boats and spear fishing. Yeah, 2020 has been a weird year. So fire is great. And whatever your lighting on fire this year to speed with you by the late Middle

Katie Dooley  45:42

Ages Christian Hey, Preston, you know what I want for Christmas?

Preston Meyer  45:50

What do you want for Christmas?

Katie Dooley  45:51

I want. You are congregant to share our podcast with one friend.

Preston Meyer  45:58

They'll be a wonderful gift to me. And to you, I suppose. I would love to have this podcast grow and spread knowledge and factual information and the ability to talk about religious about it. Absolutely. So it's not nearly enough laughter with religion. So

Katie Dooley  46:20

the greatest gift you can give this Christmas is the holy water pot holy watermelon podcast to a friend or family member and it would be a gift to ask him as well.

Preston Meyer  46:31

I agree what a wonderful idea.

In the study of the world's religions, religious groups are divided into two categories: Western (mostly Abrahamic religions), and Eastern (almost everything else). We're going to unpack these labels in this episode and chat about the similarities and differences between the two big categories. We also chat about everything that's left out (surprise, it's a lot).

All of the world’s religions come from Asia. Regarding the terms Eastern and Western, we are just referring to where in Asia they are from. The Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) are from Western Asia (Middle East), whereas religions like Buddhism, Sikhism, Hinduism and Shinto are from Eastern Asia.

The labels of Eastern and Western aren’t handy anymore. You can be any religion anywhere in the world. These labels also only apply to a handful of unified world religions. It doesn’t include Indigenous religions, Animism, or other smaller pagan groups. 

Eastern and Western religions can be broken down by their theological model. Eastern religions are more spiritual, typically polytheistic and have gods with niche stewardships. Their deities are very involved with specific things, but rarely involved with everything. Western religions are monotheistic, with Islam and modern Judaism being truly monotheistic while Christianity and the trinity are ideal monotheism. 

In this episode, we also talk about Henotheism and how it is present in the Old Testament. 

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Join the Community on Discord

Learn more great religion facts on Facebook and Instagram

Religion and pop culture go together like watermelons and summer. They are so intertwined, sometimes we don't even recognize the allusions anymore! Can pop culture be a religious experience? Can the love for pop culture go too far?

In this episode, we explore its core concepts. We talk about the role of God and touch on Buddhism. We question terms like "holy" and "sacred".

Our exploration continues into the complexities of religion and spirituality. We discuss the differences between righteousness and holiness and think about the challenges of understanding holy texts. We draw connections between deification and fan culture, questioning the rituals and tax-exempt status of both.

We then broaden our discussion to talk about spirituality versus religion. Exploring the wider scope of spirituality, including practices like sound therapy and LSD use. We challenge the idea that religion requires specific beliefs. Our conversation also touches on tax exemption for churches, inspired by John Oliver's humorous take. We share different views on whether churches should be tax-exempt, considering transparency and financial concerns. We end by inviting listeners to share their thoughts on this complex topic.

Book: Jesus Potter Harry Christ: The fascinating parallels between two of the world's most popular literary characters, by Derek Murphy

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Join the Community on Discord

Learn more great religion facts on Facebook and Instagram

**

Preston Meyer  00:14

And welcome to the holy watermelon Podcast. I'm Kate Preston.

Katie Dooley  00:20

And what are we talking about today?

Preston Meyer  00:23

What are we talking about?

Katie Dooley  00:25

I mean, I did all the research for this episode, so I should probably introduce it. We're talking about

Preston Meyer  00:31

para religion and culture, pop

Katie Dooley  00:34

culture, as religion is the topic, but religion in pop culture will definitely come up. I think it's unavoidable. We also I'm just gonna say we have a third co host, that's my dog. So if you hear snorts or jingles, that's her, that'll just help with editing if you just know she's here. Alright, so let's get started. I guess. When I was researching this, I found a term I had never actually heard before, which was pair religion and I thought that that describe what we're talking about really well. And its definition is a secular belief system having certain aspects of religion, but not all aspects of religion. So then I had to look up what religion was because if you heard our last few episodes nobody knows.

Preston Meyer  01:27

Yeah, I think the things we covered in the last two episodes lend themselves very easily to the discussion of parrot religion.

Katie Dooley  01:35

Yes, and I Yes, all the talk arounds I guess what religion is and what Gods are basically fall under pair religion. So for morons who didn't really throw up formal religion has a belief in supernatural powers, some influence or live rituals and ceremonies and so a pair religion would be missing some of those things. So this is where pop culture comes in. And that could be repaired religion, whether that sports celebrity, your favorite TV show, media, Aberdeen's media, just like a big that covers all, YouTube and books, and everything worshipping

Preston Meyer  02:17

PewDiePie.

Katie Dooley  02:20

I mean, I think we all have our favorite YouTubers. Well, yeah, I

Preston Meyer  02:24

think if you spend enough time on YouTube, you're definitely somebody that you're going to keep going back to.

Katie Dooley  02:29

It's true, like the holy watermelon podcast, right?

Preston Meyer  02:32

Like and Subscribe. He was five star reviews. So

Katie Dooley  02:37

we're getting better this. Maybe we should start our conversation with why people worship pop culture, like religion, and maybe some similarities and differences and what that looks like. I mean, you wrote a paper on this.

Preston Meyer  02:56

I did. And I didn't actually explore the why in the paper that I wrote. But I just tried to illustrate a whole bunch of things and said, See, these people are definitely religious in their reverence for these things. Yeah, sports masochism is a great example. It helps bind communities together, you go to a hockey game, and you're in a stadium filled with people who are super excited to be there to participate together and love screaming. They'll usually

Katie Dooley  03:26

well, I can't say usually that's how they worship.

Preston Meyer  03:29

Right? There's an awful lot of getting dressed up in the uniform of your favorite player who are picked. Absolutely. There's loads of war paint, I think, probably more in football games than hockey games. But I see a lot more hockey jerseys on the train in hockey season than I see football during football season. I'll think cannabis, right? CFL is not a big deal. I actually have friends who have been professional football players, but not here in Canada.

Katie Dooley  04:02

So yes, people celebrating their puck choice can look a lot like worship.

Preston Meyer  04:11

Absolutely. There's, if you look at the cosmic duality that's present in an awful lot of the big religions, there's good and evil. That's usually the way it's simplified. And it's super easy to see rival teams like the rangers and the islanders. If you like one, the other one is not likely to be anything other than the rival the evil. And that's a little bit religious. The other

Katie Dooley  04:43

Yeah, yeah, I think it's them. Absolutely. Um, I didn't put this in the show notes, but I'm actually reminded of the book that I read for the first episode called in

Preston Meyer  04:57

the beginning. Know, the face

Katie Dooley  04:59

instinct. Oh, yeah, I mean, yes, our first episode called in the beginning, the book was called a faith instinct. And it talks about how humans are programmed to be religious. And I think that this is probably one of those Why's the question of the why is that we feel compelled to be part of the community.

Preston Meyer  05:21

Yeah. And a community that is bound together by a belief in something even if that belief is as simple as our team is going to win. I remember in V for Vendetta there was that the mantra of the Chancellor Have you strength through unity, unity through faith. And that faith can be literally anything general trust or belief example from pop culture, right. It's like I studied this a little bit.

Katie Dooley  05:52

Like you're talking about pop culture, and religion.

05:58

Are such dorks? Yeah,

Preston Meyer  06:00

but it's okay. Right.

Katie Dooley  06:03

I feel like sports is kind of its own beast, especially sports and there's often a standout player, you know that Michael Jordan is in the Wayne Gretzky's. But often it's a team sport. And maybe it's because I'm a sports fan, but I can't separate out one player from another Sorry, guys. But it just blurs on the screen. On the screen. They shoot their puck into hoops and different quarters. I don't know. That was purposely bad. I know a little bit

Preston Meyer  06:39

by sports do the goal.

Katie Dooley  06:42

Figures or number y. But I would separate sports a little bit from books, movies and television because books, movies and television often have. They have a protagonist always

Preston Meyer  06:57

have their fiction. Sports are straight up real. Quidditch. People play Quidditch. That's true. I mean, it's started out as a fictional terribly nonsensical game that turned into somehow a thing that people actually do

Katie Dooley  07:13

Delmon sensical. Yeah. That's true. But there I mean, no, I'm just being a brat. But there are fictional sports to precedent. Yes. But you're right.

Preston Meyer  07:24

But we don't revere the sports heroes, for their sports achievements in these fictional stories. We revere Harry Potter, for example, not because he's a great seeker, but because he took seven or eight years to beat Voldemort.

Katie Dooley  07:41

Wow, what a great segue into talking about what a Christ figure is. I don't know if you plan on that. We're silly today. So I was reading another book to get ready for this and good book, not really what I thought was gonna be at all, it will definitely be helpful later on. But I was reading Jesus Potter, Harry Christ, and it talks about the parallels between two literary characters. It's not really a comparison of Jesus and Harry Potter. But they did provide a really great definition of what a Christ figure is. So I'm going to read that Christ figure is simply a literary reference used to identify a fictional character that seems to symbolize Jesus Christ in a significant way, such as through the endurance of suffering, a sacrificial death, or a perceived rebirth or resurrection. Many literary figures have been called Christ figures by various researchers, including a half of Moby Dick Gandalf or Frodo Baggins of Lord of the Rings, or Galahad in the Grail quest. So that's where I separate movies and TV and books a little bit is because we have these Christ's character figures that don't necessarily appear in real world forts.

Preston Meyer  09:00

And we appreciate them. Why? Because they're awesome stories.

Katie Dooley  09:04

They are awesome stories is actually it's

Preston Meyer  09:08

a hotly contested statement regarding Harry Potter. But there's an awfully large following of Harry Potter, because they're absolutely enjoyable stories, whether or not you think they're academically good.

Katie Dooley  09:26

I mean, that's a different discussion. I think the conversation I want to have around Christ figures is, why is it interesting? Is it interesting because we've heard this story for 2000 years? And I honestly don't know and I didn't think to look into it. Is there a non Judeo Christian equivalent of Christ figure? Or is this further this? This deep dive that I don't necessarily want to go into today? If you do have a Christ figure from another religious group? Is it Just because it's an even older story than we realize it probably I've answered my own question. comments, thoughts, concerns.

Preston Meyer  10:09

In my excitement for developments in the Marvel Universe, I've done a little bit of looking into this new announced TV show TV show. It's on Disney plus, probably like two or three years from now called moon night. Character I know very little about but I did some wiki reading. And he's this Jewish fella, or half Jewish, Jewish or half Jewish, who his dad is a rabbi, and he's out as a mercenary. He's a very scary dangerous fellow. And he experiences this death or near death experience. In a wanna say, Egypt, I'm going from memory from what Wikipedia article summarizes probably more than one version of the story. But, you know, when I'm just casually looking into my pop culture, learning, expectations, Wikipedia, it's an OK place to go to Manage expectations maybe. And he is approached by this Egyptian god who brings him back from this near death or, or maybe full death, to be almost himself a deeply deranged Christ figure. Crush, beggars can come in a lot of different flavors, usually they tend to be non threatening, very positive Savior figures.

Katie Dooley  11:43

And I guess the point we should clarify is I was reading about Christ figures on

Preston Meyer  11:50

wake up with fear

Katie Dooley  11:51

so easy. And it says that they need to, it's very broad, almost anyone can be a Christ figure. So I don't even know it's a great definition. Or you could argue that someone is a Christ figure very easily. So it does the character might display one or more of the following traits. What are one performance of miracles, manifestation of divine qualities healing others displaying kindness and forgiveness right there. I'm already crazy. You're fighting for justice being guided by the Spirit of the Father character, and the characters own death and resurrection

Preston Meyer  12:32

symbol.

Katie Dooley  12:33

Right so I've been seeing but healing others, like literally any doctor character, you could argue as a Christ figure because if it's

Preston Meyer  12:44

not there playing out any one of the stories in the Bible that center around Jesus doing a thing, then it's very easy argue that Christ figure.

Katie Dooley  12:52

So why What about the case for your story is so appealing 2000 years being retold and retold and retold and retold. We

Preston Meyer  13:01

all love a hero. But that's just the way it goes. And if you don't love a hero, that says something about your character that I don't want to dive into it this particular

Katie Dooley  13:11

sociopath. Seriously, like a bare minimum, you're probably a sociopath. Probably,

Preston Meyer  13:17

yeah, no judgments. We need sociopaths to keep things going.

Katie Dooley  13:23

She never likes. She

Preston Meyer  13:25

likes some heroes. But there's plenty of villains that she finds absolutely fascinating and really latches on to. These, we all generally love a hero, and a hero that we can feel some sort of familiarity with actually helps a lot. And familiarity can be achieved in a lot of different ways. If he's from your hometown, like Deadpool is from Saskatchewan, like the actual character of Deadpool, the character of Deadpool is always like Wolverine, because he's from Alberta, right? Wolverine is from Alberta, Ryan Reynolds. I think it's actually from BC. Yeah, I think. Not that I have learned the home countries of all of the superheroes ever, that would be dreadfully boring to study up on for long term that's very different. takes all kinds to make the world go round, right. So familiarity in that way is easy enough to accomplish. Another way of familiarizing yourself, what are familiarizing the hero of your story to your audience, is to make them seem like something that they're already aware of. And Jesus is pretty ubiquitous around the world. The Everyman. In some ways, he's definitely well known, at least in part. Like there's an awful lot of people who say they're Christian who straight up don't know Jesus, but they're aware of Jesus and at least a few stories.

Katie Dooley  14:59

So that's

Preston Meyer  15:03

and so that that familiarity having a Jesus type hero in your story helps to familiarize the audience with the hero.

Katie Dooley  15:14

I have a follow up question, and my brain doesn't quite know what it is.

Preston Meyer  15:18

So I think that's the why anyway,

Katie Dooley  15:22

this might be diving down a rabbit hole. Do you need to have some awareness of, of Jesus to appreciate the stories? Or is the story of Jesus based on the every story? as well?

Preston Meyer  15:37

That's the great question, isn't it? One of my favorite heroes, whose called a Jesus figure is Superman. Yeah, that was, almost all Christians will say, Jesus, and Superman, basically the same guy. But there's a couple of reasons why I really don't like that statement. Number one, is, Superman was written by a couple of Jews, who definitely would have been familiar with Christian lore live, like one of the creators was a Canadian, from Toronto, one of them was an American, they met up in Cleveland, I'm pretty sure. And they threw together this great story after a few other ideas that weren't really working out. And that's they lived in a world where Jesus was absolutely a real present thing. But if you look at the Superman story that they wrote, there's no Jesus there at all. It's all Moses. Interesting.

Katie Dooley  16:40

And that was, I guess, what I sort of talked around earlier of other religions. And because we're in North America and Judeo Christian world, are their Moses figures, or, you know, Buddha figures, or Muhammad figures, like we talked about the Christ figure, and it's very easy to find. But maybe that's just because we're in North America. And whether you're Christian or not, you just societally you grew up with it. And it's easy to read, it's easy to find. And I don't even know if it's easy to find, because people are purposely relating to the Bible, or if it's just actually good story writing?

Preston Meyer  17:26

That's a great question, right? I like that you brought up the potential of a Buddha figure made me immediately think of the matrix. I remember when it came out. And ever since everyone's like, Neo is the the awesome Jesus figure in the story. He's absolutely messianic. He actually feels to me more like a Buddha figure. He becomes enlightened. So I mean, he also has a guide, but he doesn't rely on his guide very much either. Which, I mean, there's absolutely a perfectly decent argument that he's a Jesus figure. There's several books on this subject that point that out. And I, I just happen to feel that he's more of a Buddha figure.

Katie Dooley  18:07

So while we're talking about it before we sort of move on to the next part that I want to talk about. This is storytelling format. As described by one of my favorite writers, Donald Miller, he writes books on business writing, and I use this frequently in my work so storytelling format, a character is your character.

Preston Meyer  18:34

Let's call it Luke Skywalker. How the problem Yeah, he does. He hates tending to dehumidifiers on a desert planet means the guy. Yeah, Old Ben Kenobi. That gives him a plan. Yeah, go fight the Empire. Here's your dad's lightsaber call

Katie Dooley  18:50

them to action. Yes. That Yeah. Cool. There's probably a little more with like the Republican shit but we join

Preston Meyer  19:00

the rebellion to save Princess Leia because here's a mission leads to a success. Yeah, they actually get her off the Death Star. And it avoids a failure. Yeah, she didn't get killed. And the character transformers Yeah, Luke becomes a Jedi or Well, kind of he slowly becomes aware of the force and does use it

Katie Dooley  19:21

very much a new help Luke Skywalker. Yes. Yeah, definitely.

Preston Meyer  19:28

We can definitely stretch this out further.

Katie Dooley  19:30

Right, but we could storytelling format easily can do that with Jesus. Oh, yeah. Or basically anyone else like is that any good story? Once you know this. I was literally watching Lord of the Rings and Preston came. So Frodo has the ring me scandal. Joe joins the fellowship goes to Mordor tosses three in the fire avoids the destruction of the world. And Frodo and the happy little ha But again, x finger, minus a finger and a whole bunch of points. He's actually not a happy little hobbit again. He's deeply traumatized and has to go across the sea. That's his character transformation.

Preston Meyer  20:11

Book is different than the movie. It's been. Brian

Katie Dooley  20:15

and I were talking about this. It's been so long since I've read it, I actually have no frame of reference for book to movie anymore.

Preston Meyer  20:21

Yeah, so I took a whole course on the works of Professor Tolkein, through college, and it was pretty enjoyable. We started with the Silmarillion moved through the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. And that's actually all we covered of his writings. And I really enjoyed the summer alien, first couple of chapters, and then it got really hard to keep reading, I skimmed half of The Hobbit. And then when it came to Lord of the Rings, I was so burned out that I just went I had to write something about it, I would look through the movie, to find where in the book, I would find the information I needed. And then read that chapter in the book. So I know, more or less how the story ended in the book. Remember very little, because I was skimming it looking for something. I just know that it is a lot more bleak. And sad than the end of the movie was gonna be when

Katie Dooley  21:20

I finished Jesus Potter Harry Krystal go back to Earth during Christmas. Well, what a lovely wormhole that was. So I have some example of pop culture as religion. And I really wanted to keep this episode on pop culture as religion, not religion in pop culture. But I think that would be hard.

Preston Meyer  21:40

There's definitely some blend in this Venn diagram in the mind. And

Katie Dooley  21:44

the reason I wanted to stay with pop culture is religions, because religion in pop culture is infinite. And we could talk for hours, basically, just reiterating that everyone's a Christ

Preston Meyer  21:55

figure. Right? That's all we want to do.

Katie Dooley  21:58

So there's a couple of examples I wanted to talk about. I mean, I guess, is it healthy or not? And if if there's a problem with worshiping pop culture, or treating pop culture as religion, so just keep that in mind. So two examples that kind of tie in together, both of which I love is they love Bob's Burgers episode, and we're both Bob's Burgers hands where the kids try to save an aquarium and they turn it into a church. And then there's also a John Oliver Last Week Tonight episode that I highly recommend. And he's taught he's talking about televangelists and seed face. So he actually turns his show into a registered religion with the IRA. So it can be tax exempt, and he can take donations.

Preston Meyer  22:50

It's weird that more companies don't do this. Like like in Bob's Burgers, they set up the aquarium to be a religion. We could totally take that model and just build up the temple of the shark have, basically, why, why am I blanking on the name of the big waterpark down in San Diego,

23:10

like Sealand,

Preston Meyer  23:12

like sea land, is that what it's called? SeaWorld. It's called SeaWorld where we could do, we can totally set up a thing like SeaWorld probably in a place with a warmer climate than we have, and set it up as the temple of the shark, call it a religion. If you want to come and visit the park, you have to offer a sacrifice, usually in the form of dollars. Let's be real.

Katie Dooley  23:33

That's like an admission fee.

Preston Meyer  23:35

Right? But it's not it's a sacrifice to the gods of the sharks. Come and check it out.

Katie Dooley  23:41

Well, I mean, that's a great i somebody's

Preston Meyer  23:45

gonna beat me to actually making this a real thing. Well,

Katie Dooley  23:49

I don't actually know. I've tried to find it. I can't find what the series rules are for on religion, but I hope our Congress subscribers care to make a donation to our Patreon so that we can register as a religion. I will wear giant watermelon on our heads. Sure,

Preston Meyer  24:08

I think absolutely. You try out a watermelon and it's not gonna get real gross, perfect. And then it could be a perfectly reasonable hat. I

Katie Dooley  24:15

just thought we'd make the felt but I like the cutting edge. So obviously, the buzz burgers episode is fiction, but John Oliver actually turned his show into a registered religion. Is there a problem with that?

Preston Meyer  24:35

Is there I'm asking that depends on how you want to evaluate a religion. As far as dangerous religions go. I don't think Last Week Tonight counts as a dangerous religion. Is it an abuse of the tax code? Maybe. But so the tax code be better? The tax code should absolutely be better. We got way too many and people who make way more money than I do paying less taxes than I do. And I haven't paid taxes in years.

Katie Dooley  25:10

He's been a student everyone just Yeah,

Preston Meyer  25:12

not a tax evaders, evading tax. I just have not legally been required to pay taxes in a long talk

Katie Dooley  25:20

and be like, Who's this lazy? Motherfucker?

Preston Meyer  25:25

I have only recently qualified myself to be a host on this podcast.

Katie Dooley  25:30

You're my club and then

Preston Meyer  25:33

me. No, that's not true. There's a reason there's two of us we can't just have one person who's educated and call that a podcast.

Katie Dooley  25:44

So whether or not something's legally registered entity with whatever tax place, that's where to buy looking Tax Department.

25:54

Pete stop making mouth noises. Yeah, tax taxation

Katie Dooley  25:59

hammers of your country. Is there a point where worship of media or let's say celebrities is dangerous? What you taking, taking your like, or love of thumb thing to a worship beyond level, I

Preston Meyer  26:22

suspect with no personal experience in this department, that there is somebody who genuinely believes in at least the possibility of a real life Cthulhu. And that's a thing that approaches religion. And because Cthulhu is a dark, maddening character in the writings of HP Lovecraft that could bump up against dangerous potentially.

Katie Dooley  26:55

I even mean, so much as liking How I Met Your Mother too much. Right? Is there? I don't know what that looks like. Maybe the producers met your mother have a crazy fan encounter that they want to email me about? But is there a benefit to worship worshiping something to that level? That again, that's the pure religion, not your typical religion,

Preston Meyer  27:22

but to there's a benefit. And

Katie Dooley  27:25

and is there a point where it's dangerous? So again, like, like How I Met Your Mother, the Harry Potter books,

Preston Meyer  27:33

let's go with My Little Pony,

Katie Dooley  27:34

My Little Pony. Orlando. Sure.

Preston Meyer  27:40

The reason my little pony came to mind is because you've got a strong following of people who are super committed. And I've had friends who really love My Little Pony. There's absolutely some good stories that are absolutely worth sharing with your children. My Little Pony? I don't know My Little Pony well enough, but I suspect strongly that there is. But that is a uninformed suspicion. Or at least under informed. And what I do know is that there is like You familiar rule, you're familiar with rule 34? Yes. My Little Pony has some scary Oh, no scary contributions to the internet. Oh, now and that is because of the religious or almost religious or parent religious following of this media. Well, I mean, the little plastic toys eg that you get your kids, not terribly sexual, but are they sexual at all? To some people they are if people are into what they're into, and though I'm not going to kink shame somebody I do believe that there is a line where you do need to change your behavior

Katie Dooley  29:00

I guess if you're not hurting anyone, including yourself

Preston Meyer  29:07

or other animals that often people don't feel comfortable with considering as having feelings or feeling pain, anything that sentient don't hurt it. What's What's the line for sentient?

Katie Dooley  29:24

Does it have a personality? Absolutely.

Preston Meyer  29:27

I think that's a pretty decent criteria. If you want to follow those rules that you have set then that's a perfectly good criteria to meet that.

Katie Dooley  29:36

So if your pair religion doesn't hurt anything sentient I think it's fine. Yeah,

Preston Meyer  29:43

that's that's fair, including yourself,

Katie Dooley  29:45

everyone. So

Preston Meyer  29:46

if your religion, your shrine,

Katie Dooley  29:49

that you spend all your time at and you don't eat problems, problems Yeah. So, how has religion absorbed pop culture? And religion intentionally or unintentionally can give greater meaning to media?

Preston Meyer  30:09

I don't know try to list in but it's they're both kind of big questions. Maybe we'll

Katie Dooley  30:17

end with how has religion into our pop culture. And then we can talk about some of our favorite examples, Christ figures or Bible stories that we that are like,

Preston Meyer  30:27

religion absorbing pop culture. There's an awful lot of Christians today, compared to the very few Christians 2000 years ago, who actually believed in the figure of Lilith, who is in any story that deals with a hell and a devil. And the idea of angels in pop culture that I'm aware of, there is a Lilith figure, who, in old rabbinic writings, was Adams first wife before Eve in the Garden of Eden, who was not a great wife, who would not submit yourself to Adam. And so was cast out and replaced with a far more submissive wife.

Katie Dooley  31:12

I don't know if the audience heard my IRA. Wives, but there was a pretty big iral. But

Preston Meyer  31:20

that's the story. And it's not based on the biblical text. But it's an old story that has been told so often, that it has found itself in popular culture, which has then reflected itself back on to how a lot of Christians actually look at their theology. So that's one example of pop culture affecting theology that I've observed.

Katie Dooley  31:46

Oh, that's a interesting one.

Preston Meyer  31:48

It is an interesting one, and it's interesting to dive into and look at or, or hell, the way most Catholics or even Protestants see hell is based a lot on the story of Dante, ala Gary and his Divine Comedy. Very good. So those are the two examples I've got. And they're, they're pretty cool. The Divine Comedy is a good read. But also, you know, it's a time commitment. It's broken down into three consumable chunks.

Katie Dooley  32:22

And, yeah, I mean, those are examples where it actually influences how we read Scripture.

32:32

Interesting.

Preston Meyer  32:34

I hope those answered your question.

Katie Dooley  32:36

I mean, it sure did. Okay. Now, I'm just like, pondering feel. feels to me. Also was the ascension of Mary, like added after the fact by the Catholics? Yeah, absolutely. That was a pop culture, though, because that was so old. I mean, I guess maybe it wasn't was my pop culture. But I'm glad when, when you mentioned more than how it was like what was added after the fact that people believe that's actually not in there at all. And that was one that was the question

Preston Meyer  33:02

there is how do you define pop culture?

Katie Dooley  33:04

I mean, I don't remember the date that the ascension of Mary was that like, added of cannon

Preston Meyer  33:10

was after she died.

Katie Dooley  33:13

Very good. And before I was born, so that narrows it down right? About 1900 years. Thanks, Stan. I mean, I would feel like we should put this other thing I would find pop culture is any media that is popular that is popular at the time. So I don't I don't know enough about what was happening at that time to determine whether that was based off of pop culture or not. But I think it'd be an interesting thing to look into, because I bet it was influenced by what was happening at the time.

Preston Meyer  33:43

It was the popular belief back in those days, when the story came about that to be the mother of God, you have you, therefore had to be sinless yourself. which became a problem when people started teaching that. Absolutely. Everybody is born deeply sinful. So there had to be this higher status given to Mary so that she could be a believable vessel to bear. A sinless Jesus. So the why is the word escaping me right, immaculate? The Immaculate Conception? Isn't the conception of Jesus. Yeah,

Katie Dooley  34:22

I remember learning. This is like one thing that stuck with me from my time in university with religious days is that it's the conception of Mary was immaculate and immaculate, everyone. I don't know. It actually means untouched by man, the mailman. So if your house is immaculate, it means your husband and the whole view, not just pristine it means untouched by a man immaculate fun fact.

Preston Meyer  34:45

Because men are dirty and

Katie Dooley  34:46

men are girls. My rights,

Preston Meyer  34:51

sorry. So Mary had to be elevated to this higher status. And then the story, the proto evangelio of James This tells the story of how Mary was conceived immaculately by a figure who not only bears the name and in the English translation, but straight up is a copy of the Old Testament. Hannah, the mother of Samuel. Interesting. Yeah, Mary's own story is also very similar to Samuels in the Old Testament. It's just copying older source material, like we talked about before,

Katie Dooley  35:31

before we turn on the mic. So that makes this really weird. But that'll come in an episode when we probably just talked about Jesus for at least an hour. That might be a two parter, but it could be I was saying to Preston, this book that I'm reading do this potter Christ, I thought it would be more about pop culture, but it's actually about how the the author argues that Jesus is a fictional literary character as opposed to historical. And that information for Jesus was borrowed by earlier writings, just like the Harry's in the frozen world are borrowed from Jesus. So Preston, why is some of your favorite Jesus see pop culture for lack of a better term? Because like I said, there was gonna be no way we could talk about pop culture as religion without religion and pop culture. So what are some of your favorite examples of religion in pop culture, and it can be anything like, I'm just going to test out the Book of Mormon musical is amazing.

Preston Meyer  36:33

There's so much fun. I like that though. It addresses the theology of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. That's not what the story is about. It's about two missionaries who straight up make their own theology and really screw up. And the potential for teaching in Uganda, where the Church of Jesus Christ is not currently present, as far as I know, not at least on any official status. It is a pretty funny example of religion and pop culture. We had a lot of fun go into that show together. Huh, my favorite. There's,

37:11

I have a bunch.

Preston Meyer  37:11

There's so many little aspects of things that are all over the place and so many different media. What what's coming to your mind? Well,

Katie Dooley  37:19

one of my favorite things to do this sounds so stupid, is I like to listen to the Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack, which, if you haven't listened to it, it's an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical from the 70s. And it's like the last few days of Jesus. And then I'll listen to Book of Mormon because then it's chronological. But it's like Jesus Christ Superstar, like very serious. And book Mormons not. But I listen to them both together and think about all my theology and for the day. I mean, if we're talking Christ figures, I've always been a big Harry Potter fan, literally just watching Lord of the Rings. I think those are probably my big ones. I had another point to make, but I'll let you tell me about some of your favorite examples.

Preston Meyer  38:09

My most ridiculous example was Hamlet two is a ridiculous movie. I can't remember the name of the star. But basically, the idea of the show is that this new theater teacher comes to school and says, I got this show plan that's really going to rock everybody's socks. It's a sequel to Hamlet. I was like, what? Everybody died in Hamlet.

Katie Dooley  38:42

I mean, I know it's been done very rarely, but it's rare that not the original author does

Preston Meyer  38:49

like, right? Like the idea of a spiritual sequel is one thing, but this is straight up Hamlet two, meant to be a sequel to the original Hamlet done 400 years later. Oh, now, as a musical. If I remember correctly, it's actually been fairly confident it was a musical. And so everybody's dead. You have to bring them back to life. How do you do that? Bring in Jesus.

Katie Dooley  39:18

Jesus just resurrected everyone. Yeah,

Preston Meyer  39:19

and it's just gets crazy. So that was a lot of fun. I mean, I wouldn't call it high quality cinema, but I would recommend it. It was some good fun. The opposite end of that spectrum. I would say you've got things like the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Aslan is Jesus. Absolutely.

Katie Dooley  39:41

CSS is very open about that. He's Yeah, apologist and I don't mind Lion, the Witch in the wardrobe.

Preston Meyer  39:49

It's the only story in the series that I actually familiarized myself with and I did enjoy it well enough, though. It's weird that the kids walk into Narnia in land full of sentient animals of all shapes and sizes, wearing fur. And nobody talks about

Katie Dooley  40:08

my problem. My problem book in the CS Lewis series was the Silver Chair. That one is like, have some religion shoved down your throat. And that one I actually struggle with read that one, like the entire thing is very preachy, I found this, and that's why I remember it, because there's a bunch of books and I couldn't list them all to you. I will read the series once but everywhere the sellers are being very, very preachy, but

Preston Meyer  40:34

I do enjoy the Lenten it's a good it's a good movie, which is the only basis I have to judge the series on I've never actually read any CS Lewis, I have Mere Christianity on my shelf. I've been meaning to read it for 10 years, and I still haven't gotten around. Well, I'm gonna assign it to you in a podcast. Is it even a long book?

Katie Dooley  40:55

Well, one more question I want to address especially to you as a religious person, and I have my own ideas for this but as a whole and religious person I can't really answer it is getting away with religion in pop culture, especially like, really blame examples of Jesus Christ Superstar Book of Mormon, I have Lucifer here on the list. Where you are dealing with Canon and scripture. How do you not offend people?

Preston Meyer  41:30

What do you mean? Do I fail to offend people?

Katie Dooley  41:34

Personally, people that you personally. Um,

Preston Meyer  41:40

I'm sorry, I guess I don't understand the question. Well,

Katie Dooley  41:44

you remember the LDS church? Why are you not offended by the Book of Mormon? The musical not not the actual book?

Preston Meyer  41:52

Because I don't take it personally, I guess like there are. There's one song I believe,

Katie Dooley  41:58

which favorite song five out that out right now. You don't want me to?

Preston Meyer  42:02

I've seen people use it as just a fun song to say, yeah, these are the things we believe. And the tone of it is a little mocking in some parts, particularly those parts that slightly misrepresent what we believe. But it's also sung by a fellow named Kevin who, that's, that's what he believes. And though most of it reflects the general belief of the church, not all of it does, technically. It's, I accept it as an expression of a fictional person's belief. Constantine, the movie, not the TV show, they came up with Keanu Reeves, like, almost 15 years ago or whatever. Yeah. Perfectly enjoyable. There's a part in it. There's like, while in hell Corinthians has a couple of extra chapters or whatever. It's been a while since I've seen that too. But I remember that little thing. And it's just like, that's weird. Because there's plenty of extra books in the Bible that could be added that aren't books that we know the Bible talks about, that are no longer available, things like that would have been easier to say, oh, yeah, it's in these other writings of Paul, rather than saying, Yeah, this epistle just had an extra chapters that have been cut. It's kind of weird. But it doesn't offend me it just but it does hit me as kind of weird. And Lilith being used, like, as mentioned before, in almost every story that deals with hell, and angels and demons. It doesn't offend me, it just that storytelling, in that universe, things are different. It's to think that all stories take place in the same universe I live in. It's just asking to be offended and have problems. But if you accept a thing as fiction, and everything's gonna be just fine. The way I deal with it is,

Katie Dooley  44:00

I guess, then my follow up question. And then maybe I'll go into my thoughts. Is there a point or place where pop culture could cross a line? Where is there a way they could have done the Book of Mormon musical, for example, that you have been like, this is super offensive to everything. I believe, if they were, I mean, and maybe if you can remove yourself a bit, because if you can separate people who can't separate themselves from that,

Preston Meyer  44:29

I think if something is deliberately defamatory, like the Book of Mormon, talks about the book, more musical talks about how Joseph Smith found the plates and how to pass them off to Brigham Young and said, Don't let anyone see them. I mean, that's straight up not true, but it's not presented as deliberately defamatory. It's presented from the point of view of a character who straight up has zero familiarity with his church's history. And so that if you were to make that transition and to make the Book of Mormon musical about the coming forth of the Book of Mormon and make it straight up contradictory to all of the histories that we have available on that time, that would probably be offensive. But when it's told from the point of view of us, completely ignorant figure, it's way less offensive.

Katie Dooley  45:26

Okay, perfect. That's

Preston Meyer  45:27

where I stand.

Katie Dooley  45:28

And that's that was my thoughts, again, that I can't say as a non believer, but I have a friend who's quite a devout Christian, she loves loose fur, but she's also said some very accurate to Scripture. Obviously, loose fur does not come to earth as a hot man, fortunately, but every time they reference something biblical, it's accurate, and that's where she enjoys it. And I, when I first saw this, her not knowing that much, I was like, Oh, she don't like this, but she enjoys it because it's accurate. And and you just kind of confirmed that and because it's accurate, or accurate to the character. It's like, okay,

Preston Meyer  46:08

if in Lucifer, for example, where you have a figure living on Earth as this hot dude, imagine having Jesus show up, but instead of being like Jesus, he's like Zeus from the old tales in Greece, that would be offensive to people. Because that's, edges straight up a misrepresentation of the character. And biblically we have very little detail on what the character of Lucifer really is. And presenting him in any sort of way that is attractive to people. It makes perfect sense based on his role, that it's not offensive.

Katie Dooley  46:50

And I mean, for the premise of the show, a good character to pick Crake Jesus as a crap.

Preston Meyer  46:57

No, it wouldn't work. It wouldn't be interesting, I think.

47:00

Yeah.

Preston Meyer  47:03

I think it would straight up fail to be interesting.

Katie Dooley  47:04

There's that show. I haven't seen that Netflix club Messiah. Have you seen the

Preston Meyer  47:08

previous I've seen the previous for it. I've heard it's good. Yeah.

Katie Dooley  47:12

Anyway, that was a complete digression. But any final thoughts any bows you want to tie in wrap up this episode?

Preston Meyer  47:23

Religion is complicated. Don't be afraid to try to talk to your friends about it. And the things we've addressed I think are both fascinating and very deep wells to dive into as always are

Katie Dooley  47:43

you have any thoughts or comments are lovely congregants that's phone calling you know, shoot us an email let us know your favorite Christ speaker is or example of religion and pop culture at and it was wrong last episode because I hadn't said that up yet. Holy watermelon pod [email protected]. And leave us five stars on your preferred podcast player and subscribe and share with a friend. He's been with you

Now that we (sorta) know what a god is, what qualifies as religion? If almost anything can be a god... can anything be a religion?!

In this episode, we discuss what religion is. Does there need to be a God to worship? Well, it’s a tricky thing to explain. There are many religions like Buddhism and Confucianism that, while they have one founder, aren’t directly worshiped like we see in the Abrahamic religions. 

The foundation of the word religion (ligaments) means to be connected to something. We go over a couple of accepted definitions for religion, break them down into their parts and identify their flaws. 

Is it a unified system of belief? Often there are differences within the same group. Or is religion a metaphysical moral vision? 

With groups looking for tax-exempt status from the CRA and the IRS, we discuss how important it is for people to be aware of what actually counts as a religion. 

And finally, is Katie actually religious? With these definitions, you might be surprised! 

A good sequel to this episode is #16 Abide with Me, where we talk about parody religions.

Support us at Patreon and Spreadshirt

Join the Community on Discord

Learn more great religion facts on Facebook and Instagram

**

Katie Dooley  00:11

Welcome back to the latest and greatest episode of The Holy watermelon Podcast. I'm Katie.

Preston Meyer  00:16

And I'm Preston.

Katie Dooley  00:17

And today we are having another big roundabout episode on what is religion? Do

Preston Meyer  00:24

you have an answer for that question? I don't you want to make a stab at it?

Katie Dooley  00:30

Yes, it is a belief system, a commonly shared belief system by a group of people that worship of God, please see episode two, what is a God to know how good that definition was?

Preston Meyer  00:52

Does it have to have a God? It could have multiple gods but a minimum of one.

Katie Dooley  00:57

I would say yes. But again, we know how big a god is. So we can have the church of mom and dad.

Preston Meyer  01:03

What about Buddhism?

Katie Dooley  01:06

Do they not worship the Buddha?

Preston Meyer  01:08

So that's the trick is, though Tallis Buddhism, specifically believe in a pretty cool cosmology. But there's multiple statements from Dalai Lama and whoever else that any theological study is a distraction and a waste of time, because there is no god for Buddhism

Katie Dooley  01:34

and philosophies of the person, right.

Preston Meyer  01:36

And the Buddha, of course, is a figure who is revered but not a Judeo Christian defined God, even though according to some of the definitions we came up with last time, it's not unfair to call him a god.

Katie Dooley  01:55

So we're off to a great start. Right?

Preston Meyer  01:57

All right, yeah. Not only is God tricky, but religion is tricky. And we're gonna dive into that a little bit, I

Katie Dooley  02:05

think we're gonna have another round about a PSA that will hopefully clarify more than confused.

Preston Meyer  02:13

If nothing else, you'll have something to discuss with your friends. And that's all we want at the end of this, isn't it? So there are competing schools of thoughts, of course, like in literally any other subject worth discussing. So question is, how do you define religion? I want to read to you a couple of definitions that I've got here from some well respected scholars. First is Emile Durkheim. So he defined religion as a unified system of beliefs and practices, relative to sacred things, which is super broad, but also closes things in reasonably well, I think I

Katie Dooley  02:56

feel like the word sacred is actually a problematic word in that sentence, because then we get into what does sacred mean, the definition of sacred, just like we had the definition of worship and definition of a god. I think everyone probably hold something different, sacred. I also don't like the word sacred. And maybe this is a tangent. But I think is now's a good time to dive into that. I don't like the word sacred, in general, because it means it can't be questioned. I think that's why religion today has so many problems is because you can't talk or question things that are sacred. And, yeah, it breeds a lot of problems in with power and corruption. Because you can't question your church or your priests because it's a sacred institution. And we probably should be questioning justice. Thanks.

Preston Meyer  03:55

Always question authority.

Katie Dooley  03:59

So dismantle the patriarchy.

Preston Meyer  04:03

There are different definitions of sacred even most people that I've talked to say that sacred is completely synonymous with holy. They're probably people that I haven't talked to who are happy to say, no, no, no, those are two very different things,

Katie Dooley  04:19

I would actually fall into that category. Okay.

Preston Meyer  04:22

How would you describe holy,

Katie Dooley  04:26

I would add the magical element to Holy, okay. Whereas, I can see and almost agree with, you know, that marriage to an extent is sacred, right. I'm all for divorce. And, you know, in some ways, I think it's pure, but I can see why someone call marriage sacred. But I don't think that totally in any way, shape or form. Because you can have marriages very separate from church. Your look like

Preston Meyer  04:59

you I'm listening and I have ideas. Okay, I'm letting you go.

Katie Dooley  05:04

Yeah, I really feel like holy has that magical mystical as the words and religious size mystical element to it that it's like a squares or rectangles or a rectangle isn't a square. That's how I feel holy things are sacred, but also because holy can help you much more than that. It's okay.

Preston Meyer  05:28

Yeah, so sacred is kind of tricky. In most contexts, it is things that like, don't don't approach that thing. In the Old Testament, and, by natural continuation of things, the New Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures have the word sacred or holy. In most translations, they seem to be used pretty interchangeably. But it's a thing that's set apart, set aside, the Levites, were always a sacred group, not because they shouldn't ever be questioned, but because they were set aside and separated from the rest of Israel. All the rest of Israel got this cool inheritance of the land is Levites got a handful of cities and altars to offer sacrifice on so they were made separate. Then you got the NAZA rights, who, like myself, I'm gonna make a little statement right here, that sounds super terrible. But I am even more holy. Because I set myself apart slightly further by being an azurite. Doesn't mean I'm above questioning or anything else like that. I'm just a little different, until I can slough off this mantle of being an azurite, which is coming up soon. Oh, yes, the holier than thou. Right? It's a phrase that came out this just the other day. And when most people say, you know that this person has a holier than thou attitude, or somebody says, I'm holy back off, that's usually holy is the wrong word. Usually, that's with the sense of self righteousness, I'm so much better than you because I do this thing that you aren't doing, or I'm not doing these things that you do, which is just a terrible way to operate running through life, you alienate pretty much everybody, which is never good.

Katie Dooley  07:22

No, it's not.

Preston Meyer  07:24

There's a huge difference between righteousness and holiness. And I

Katie Dooley  07:29

don't think a truly holy person would ever describe themselves as holy.

Preston Meyer  07:35

I can't agree completely.

Katie Dooley  07:37

It's one of those. I'm trying to think of a real world example of like, the nicest, kindest people would never acknowledge how nice and tight or generous people, right BOSU. Now

Preston Meyer  07:51

you're talking about humility, I guess, which is safer to connect to righteousness than necessarily to holiness. Holiness and sacredness is definitely about being separated from what is not in that same category. literally anybody and everybody should be interested in being humble to some degree. Some people may be a little too humble for their own good. Some people definitely need to be humbled, maybe have that thrust upon them for Sibley. Righteousness is very different from that righteousness, in the biblical sense, is a matter of being a just person. And everybody should seek after being just, and it's super easy to see when somebody is terribly unjust. And that's also getting tricky to police properly, I guess, but also forcing somebody to meet any criteria of righteousness, that don't demanding somebody meet your standards of righteousness? If they're not already committed to that is obscene. Yes,

Katie Dooley  09:13

and this is probably an episode for another day. We're talking about righteousness and standards of righteousness. This literally comes down to how you interpret your holy text. And there's everyone interprets differently. It doesn't matter if you're the same denomination. It's a mess people.

Preston Meyer  09:32

I mean, even the Torah, the Hebrew Bible, the law that's given, some of it is written as received from God as divine law. And then a huge swath of the content is stuff that was added later on a case by case basis of oh, we need to codify this. And the stuff that we have in the Torah that is in the Written Torah, but now Not the Oral Torah is just the stuff that was codified earlier before they said, Yeah, we're not going to add to this anymore.

Katie Dooley  10:08

All right, so that was a big wormhole. Yeah, give us another definition. So

Preston Meyer  10:14

we looked at Durham's definition of religion and then took a hard left her into secret. So unified system of belief is what Durkheim said. And I mean, if you look within any religious group, there's usually varying opinions, unless your group is way too small. And even then you got somebody who's gotten a varying opinion, who just isn't saying something a little different from that is max Stackhouse, he defined religion as a comprehensive worldview or metaphysical moral vision that is accepted as binding because it is held to be in itself, basically true. And just even if all dimensions of it cannot either be fully confirmed or refuted. So basically, even though I kind of like it, it is way too broad.

Katie Dooley  11:05

It is very wordy, but there are definitely parts of it that I really like. Should we break

Preston Meyer  11:12

that down a little bit and examine the parts of it. So comprehensive worldview?

Katie Dooley  11:17

I like that.

Preston Meyer  11:20

So far, incredibly broad. If you want to run through your life with thinking nothing about anything big and just considering how dogs are pretty cool, and objectively better than cats, and there are people who hold this opinion. That's that's a worldview that may be completely comprehensive if you decide that nothing else is worth thinking about. Next is a metaphysical moral vision.

Katie Dooley  11:54

I like the metaphysical. And why? Because? Because I think the world's most popular religions have that metaphysical aspect. Obviously, we're gonna come across ones that don't. But I think that encompasses the Judeo Christian God without, you know, offending them. And, you know, all the way to the breadth of into Gods and Goddesses. Yeah, metaphysical, and it, you know, it encompasses some bad ones, too. I'm thinking it was Scientology that compasses that as well. Because yeah, every metaphysical is a broad term, it's, you know, I like it.

Preston Meyer  12:47

So I've said before, I believe you to be a religious person, and every time you laugh, and think that that's nonsense, but I know that you have a metaphysical moral vision. Do you believe in love?

Katie Dooley  13:02

Yeah.

Preston Meyer  13:05

And that to a degree, one, one degree or another, that love should more or less be spread out to more than your immediate community of the four people in his house or your family or your next door neighbor's? That's a metaphysical moral vision, where we get into humanism, which is according to stack house, or at least my interpretation of this definition, Stackhouse offers a religious position

Katie Dooley  13:38

well, let's let's keep going. Yeah, hearing I'm hearing him talking Off mic brands like, let's keep going. And I think he narrows it down a bit more though. Yes,

Preston Meyer  13:49

he does. There's there's definitely more so this metaphysical moral vision must be accepted as binding. If somebody says Love isn't important, you can treat your neighbors like dirt. Would you feel that that person has breached a moral contract or a social contract?

Katie Dooley  14:09

I mean, I think they were in Dec but I

Preston Meyer  14:13

don't think that's different from what I just said I get hurt from I like your words better and I use them often Off mic.

Katie Dooley  14:21

But I don't have a contract with these people.

Preston Meyer  14:25

Not a written contract but

Katie Dooley  14:28

yeah, I was like It's not like I kicked them out my house but I probably would if your back so Okay, carry on. All right.

Preston Meyer  14:38

So metaphysical moral vision that is accepted as binding, because it is held to be in itself basically true or unjust. So the basically to makes me giggle. Just true at its deepest level of in this example, loving your neighbors and your community.

Katie Dooley  15:01

is like I read that as like, basically true because we can't prove otherwise,

Preston Meyer  15:06

which is definitely the way he finished that with cannot either be fully confirmed or refuted. But

Katie Dooley  15:13

which follows on like in my brain, it's like red flag, red flag because you can create anything based off that. And I mean, we'll get more into how, you know things like tax exemption, anything can be tax exempt with these definitions. Yes. It's

Preston Meyer  15:38

as much as you see people in the scholarly world have a hard time to find religion. Legislators straight up avoid it most of the time. Well

Katie Dooley  15:47

imagine, I obviously they would be specialists in the area, but the IRS and the CRA. Like they're not religious scholars, they're just trying to do their job. And like said, yes, they would be specialized in the area of religious organizations. But at some point, they must just shake their head and go fine.

Preston Meyer  16:06

Stamp 711 not a church move.

Katie Dooley  16:10

I mean, I mean, 711 every Sunday morning, sure. To get gas

Preston Meyer  16:15

to seven women sell gas, the

Katie Dooley  16:18

one by replace, that's okay. That's nice.

Preston Meyer  16:22

It seems like more and more similar ones are moving away to just being a convenience store. But that's, I'm moving away from the topic of discussion. So, in between those two examples we have of Durkheim and Stackhouse, we have a wide variety of different interpretations on what qualifies as a religion based on however you wanted to find it. The idea of having a god as you had said before, Confucianism is something that doesn't fit into that at all. Confucius barely qualifies as a God according to the definitions we came up with before. He still kind of does. Like the Buddha, but twist, slightly less divine position, but still is he's revered as a God as a great teacher. And as many great teachers were deified, but it's, it's super complicated. If you want to have a broad definition of religion, you're gonna start including things you didn't want to include in your list of gods. Wayne Gretzky or Eric Clapton. These people are Mee Mee Mee Mee Mee Mee these people are revered as gods by an awful lot of people Michael Jackson,

Katie Dooley  17:49

King of Pop, he even has the the monarchy on it.

Preston Meyer  17:55

There's there's all kinds of people who have huge followings have the great big gatherings that churches or the government like to see in churches and whatnot.

Katie Dooley  18:06

And on regular basis. Yeah,

Preston Meyer  18:09

there's definitely rules and standards that fan clubs will expect people to meet. I brought a huge paper on this very subject a little less than a year ago. And there's, there's so much that has a religious following around these people that are basically heroes that become deified because of our worship of them. And they look like religions, when you see the way people behave, just the way you have a priest throw on his robe and his scarf, every mass, you'll have all these hockey fans throw on their jerseys on their face paint and all these very similar things. And so they can go and perform their rituals. That looks awfully religious, but it doesn't fit into what we want religion to be defined as.

Katie Dooley  19:14

Do you think if these Eric Clapton like push for it, he could get tax exempt status?

Preston Meyer  19:22

I really doubt it. And

Katie Dooley  19:26

which we're gonna do an episode on.

Preston Meyer  19:29

Depends on how he goes about it, I suppose. Like if he says, I'm starting the church of Eric Clapton, the guitar God, then that's all there is to it. And somebody has given tax exempt status. I mean, you just keep applying to applying in different jurisdictions, and somebody's going to grant it. And so with all these different religions are all kinds of different acts of worship like we're dressing a certain way, reading certain texts, texts, color Think baseball cards is not wildly different from collecting different religious books. In the actual act of collection, what you do with them is also not terribly different. For an awful lot of people, they'll collect their baseball cards and never read them with a lot of people in their Bibles, while others are way into the stats that they can find on their baseball cards, and they studied them and try and figure things out. There are people who have made games around baseball cards, which sounds kind of cool, from my perspective as a game designer, as well. And you've got people who are way into their scriptures that want to learn every little detail. And there's everything in between. And that's a sort of religious worship, in both cases, with the baseball cards and with the holy books. So what is religious? Anything? But there's more to it. Often enough, you'll have people who are spiritual but not religious is a super common phrase. Yes. You'll hear that a lot in interviews of celebrities in Hollywood, that if you ask them about their spirituality be like, Yeah, I'm spiritual but not religious. There's, I got Ron Perlman coming to mind, I can't think of why. But you must have been cited it in one of my classes. But what does that phrase even me?

Katie Dooley  21:40

I mean, it's funny, especially when we started talking about me, because arguably, I'm spiritual, but not religious. But I wouldn't even consider myself that. So. Everyone is spiritual, but not religious, especially with these definitions we have of religion, I think the most common if you ask someone who said that what they're all right. That the verb they want to give it a pause for, right? If you ask someone, what their definition was, I think spiritual presidents who blame God but not in organized religion?

Preston Meyer  22:21

I think that's pretty standard. I think I agree with you that most people would make that distinction when they've used that phrase, which

Katie Dooley  22:27

just blows this whole thing up and are they tax exempt? Can you be individually tax exempt for being spiritual, not religious?

Preston Meyer  22:38

See, the New Testament, there's, Oh, I feel bad that I I don't want to misquote it. I need to get my bad. I got my phone. Oh, it says in the New Testament, your body is a temple. If your body is a temple, it's not wildly different from a church, you should be tax exempt.

Katie Dooley  23:01

care right now and be like that my body's a pimple,

Preston Meyer  23:05

right? I'm there for I should be tax exempt. So spiritual, and that spiritual, but not religious. Let's examine spiritual what does that mean?

Katie Dooley  23:18

I think that's even broader. Because

Preston Meyer  23:22

do you have to believe in a God to be spiritual? No,

Katie Dooley  23:25

I don't think so. And Katie's controversial in it would be this is like all we worry, I was what I would call it. So if you're spiritual, and you do right here, if you're spiritual, and you do sound therapy, or for spiritual and take a bunch of LSD and go to Shambhala, like that, I would categorize that all under spiritual, I would also categorize someone who's a Christian doesn't go to church, or belong to a particular denomination, because they have problems with whatever, whether it's tithing or controversies in the church, or just they don't want to get up and go. Every Sunday, I would also put them into categories spiritual. But yeah, I would put a lot of worry under spirituality as well, that I wouldn't. And these people would probably disagree. I wouldn't put that under religion. Like I wouldn't put Reiki or taro under religion, but I would absolutely put under spiritual and people who practice these things are probably shaking their fists. I mean, going it's my religion. Yeah.

Preston Meyer  24:41

Okay,

Katie Dooley  24:41

do you have any comments on my definition of groupings?

Preston Meyer  24:47

I like and it's it's not terribly different from one of the my notes like you kind of got it. There's the if you're spiritual, not religious, oftentimes because there's the whole have some sort of faith without being connected to a group worship at home or Reiki or Tarot or whatever, is usually a lot less group oriented, which when we talked about religion, religion, this nonsense word that appears to have left my mind.

Katie Dooley  25:18

Tire podcast is about Yeah,

Preston Meyer  25:21

we I think we talked before in previous episodes that religion usually is a thing that binds people together. Yeah. Yeah. And if your spiritual not religious, it's usually you feel that way because you're not part of a faith community. Not always the case. But definitely often enough that I feel comfortable saying usually without having done any proper surveys.

Katie Dooley  25:45

Definitely, I'd say kind of sound like my mother, it's definitely more loosey goosey. Yeah, I know women who participate in circles and some go all the time and some go some of the time and some of them try it once. Whereas if you're a good practitioner of Judeo Christian religion, you go every week, whatever your day happens to be. Some

Preston Meyer  26:07

Christians would go to Mass every day. Usually these are retirees but not exclusively. But

Katie Dooley  26:15

I'd say a good minimum of once a week whereas I mean Moon circles

Preston Meyer  26:22

every night know when

Katie Dooley  26:23

circles happen monthly and I said just from five never been to one maybe we should go to one Preston. I don't know if you're allowed to that's for for women. Oh, that's an excellent point. Identifying people. But my the feeling I've gotten I've seen women go is that some will drop in some wool, when when they need it kind of thing as opposed to make

Preston Meyer  26:46

sense. A lot of people are like that was church. Feel like I needed add on needed. I'd rather go golfing today, you got a full spectrum of group engagement, warm summer

Katie Dooley  26:58

day in Canada, you don't pass those up, right?

Preston Meyer  27:03

Another Lord will understand

Katie Dooley  27:05

that wasn't very Canadian. That was more Irish.

Preston Meyer  27:09

You also mentioned those people who believe in God while avoiding say, definitely faulty human authority. So spiritual, I actually read a great book by a Catholic priest, Ronald Brule. Heiser, I imagine some of the people listening might if you're into this kind of podcast, you've probably been made aware of him before. He's done a lot of writing. And his book called The Holy longing goes into very deeply what is spirituality in the pursuit of another goal, but the, the passionate pursuit of life is spirituality. According to him. Oh, interesting. Janis Joplin is an example he uses. Who you look Janis Joplin, you don't think oh, yeah, that's a that's a religious person. And some people based on their own definition of spirituality probably wouldn't even think she's spiritual, but real hazards like, No, this is a very spiritual. And I can disagree. His definition of being passionately engaged in celebrating life is a pretty good definition for me for spirituality. And he doesn't have it tied to any belief in immortality or anything like that. It's the passionate pursuit of celebrating life, which is pretty cool, but also very broad, very

Katie Dooley  28:47

broad. Because by that definition, I'm spiritual but not religious.

Preston Meyer  28:52

Right? Or maybe you are religious to?

Katie Dooley  28:57

Is this the ultimate goal for the podcast that I turn you into an atheist to determine a religious person?

Preston Meyer  29:02

Well see, I'm not even throwing theology. You're saying, but you are some sort of religious.

Katie Dooley  29:12

And where was I going with this? But I still wouldn't call myself that, but maybe we'll do an episode on the self identification. Sure, we can look into that. But yeah, that's a very everyone's spiritual but not religious definition.

Preston Meyer  29:30

Okay. So I've got you spiritual, according to roll Heiser, and I've got your religious according to Stackhouse. So, looking at what is religion? I personally think that the fundamental basics of the word, the etymology of it, bring us to being connected to something ligature, for example, connects things. That's a big part of the word religious, or religion. And so you can either be concerned about being connected to a god, or being connected to a community or being connected to one person, you got a lot of freedom there is being connected, you can be concerned about connecting the universe together just in understanding it, not in any sort of metaphysical way, but in a very physical way of just understanding the universe almost fits into religion. And we talked before about how science can be kind of religious. But then we're getting too into a field that opens up religion a little too broad.

Katie Dooley  30:49

How about this on the defensive point? Do you think these definitions need to be more specific? Do we need to narrow them down? I'm thinking quite specifically as for tax exemption, but even you know, we're talking about I'm a spiritual and religious atheist. You know, what do I put on my senses? Do people need to be more aware of these definitions? And I mean, by maybe another link, does it even matter?

Preston Meyer  31:24

At the CS degree question, if you're way into dogs, doesn't matter what a Maine Coon is. I mean, your focus is, wherever your focus is going to be, you don't need to know about big cats, if you just straight up bar, dog person,

Katie Dooley  31:39

dogs their life.

Preston Meyer  31:42

So the idea of finding an answer to this question has its purpose perplexed an awful lot of scholars, and an awful lot of them straight up, don't care enough to put the time into it. They'd rather look more at the manifest manifestations of spiritual behavior, how people congregate, rather than why they congregate maybe.

Katie Dooley  32:13

So it's really just a very specific area of sociology and anthropology. Absolutely. I know from your schooling, you've touched on things like sports is religion, and science is religion. So as you see, well, if you don't know what a religion is, how do you know it's study religious scholar, but you clearly have studied and all so

Preston Meyer  32:35

it's actually really, really complicated. Even though I mean, it shouldn't be. Like, if you say, that train of thought, it's gone, we can scrub this part of the eye, knowing what religion is like, somebody says, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, whatever. You think, religion. That's a religion. And it's part of a lived experience, and you just have been around it, you by osmosis, you just have grown to categorize things this way, because you just keep observing it without knowing exactly what what's what, for example, your understanding of color, wildly different from my understanding of color. I know that there's between this wavelength and this wavelength, I can see different colors. I would count six different colors in the the various wavelengths. I know you see way more colors than that. Yeah, and some people would count fewer than six. Yeah. And the study of color is a fascinating thing that the when you see green versus blue, you have different words for them. Whereas in some parts of the world, I've been told that the there them together. Yeah, there are personal it's green through Blue is one color, orange and red. That's red. And there's yellow in the middle. And that's the deal. Purple usually isn't lumped in with blue, but I bet you there's somebody out there who does

Katie Dooley  34:20

some crazy person, send us an email, if that's you. Right.

Preston Meyer  34:25

I want to learn more about that too.

Katie Dooley  34:27

I want to learn more about your world. I'm really curious about the tax exemption question and the definition of religion because

Preston Meyer  34:37

what qualifies you for being tax exempt

Katie Dooley  34:39

and we are going to touch I don't want to get too too deep into this episode because we're going to actually talk about it next episode, but John Oliver talks about the IRS tax exemption in one of his episodes of Last Week Tonight. And he actually gets Last Week Tonight, tax exempt under their definition of religion and And that's fine for Last Week Tonight, because it was basically a big joke. And they donated all their money to I believe Doctors Without Borders that we have cases like, specifically I'm thinking the Church of Scientology has, I want to save billions of dollars of real estate holdings. And they're tax exempt, and they had to fight for tax exemption for a really long time. But I would argue that that's probably one that should have been caught.

Preston Meyer  35:35

But it's a religion, isn't it? Most of the people involved genuinely believe in the spiritual or metaphysical or whatever it is that's going on that is taught in that very militaristic group.

Katie Dooley  35:55

So, Katie, controversial opinion, I need the same time for this. What if churches just weren't tax exempt? That I honestly think would be that

Preston Meyer  36:10

it would simplify things a lot?

Katie Dooley  36:13

Because, I mean, I don't pay tax in the States. But obviously, there is churches Scientology here in Canada, to Catholic Church has a ton of money. And as a taxpayer, yeah, that kind of sucks. So they are tax free. And it could be contributed a lot to I mean, people in other ways that aren't their parishioners. I know one of the big sticking points for the Church of Scientology is with other churches, you have to prove that the money that you save in taxes going back to your parishioners to help them in some way. And from my understanding, there's no proof in the Church of Scientology, that their money that they save is going back to their parishioners, especially because those people pay for all of their courses.

Preston Meyer  37:05

So that devil's advocate on that specific detail. No, I'd love to, I don't want anybody to confuse me with a defender of Scientology. But I, from what I understand, an awful lot of Scientologists get to live on property owned by the Church of Scientology, which might just be enough for the government to say yes, they're benefiting.

Katie Dooley  37:29

I've heard the empty. So maybe that's what nobody actually lives.

Preston Meyer  37:37

That could be true. I am standing here as a person who knows not nearly enough about Scientology's mechanical working is to discuss them properly.

Katie Dooley  37:47

Mike Rinder if you're listening, we'd love to interview because he would be able to answer that question. Yes, as an atheist, that is my solution. No tax exemption for churches.

Preston Meyer  38:03

It seems simple enough to accomplish it would make an awful lot of people more comfortable with what's going on, especially since there's an awful lot of abuse in church systems. Well,

Katie Dooley  38:17

and that's that's sort of my point in getting this definition more specific is how do we avoid people just becoming churches for tax exemption? And again, we're gonna talk about this next episode, in addition to the John Oliver, when there was a fantastic Bob's Burgers episode, where they do just that to save an aquarium, they may think, obviously, Bob's Burgers is fiction. Spoilers. So they wrote that storyline where it's John Oliver did it in real life. They made the aquarium at church to save it from being shut down. So how do you how is this Can we get tax exemption for the Holy watermelon podcast? Because we meet here, bi weekly. And Taylor growing our congregations growing and you join us every two weeks, and we worship the sound God Bryant, like that. I mean, part of me wants to try hard. He doesn't want to fight this era. But any final thoughts? I love to pause if it's not a final class, you can cut out for it final.

Preston Meyer  39:34

What else haven't we covered?

Katie Dooley  39:35

I mean, we got to tie this on a nice bow even though we really didn't answer the question because we knew this was another big broad episode on what is religion

Preston Meyer  39:45

is super complicated. Just like what is it can be super broad or super narrow. If you narrow it in too much. You're gonna be cutting people out. If you say it has to have a God. Then you've cut out most Buddhists and all kinds humanists unless of course, you go with a far too broad definition of God. It's super complicated. I enjoy talking about it. And you should definitely talk to your friends about it.

Katie Dooley  40:15

If you Yes, you have any questions, you should shoot us an email at Holy [email protected]. And we'd love to hear any episode ideas or talking points you'd like us to address.

Preston Meyer  40:30

Send us your questions, comments, complaints. If you have hate mail for us, we'll read it will read it for sure. I think it'll be fun.

Katie Dooley  40:39

I think we'll do fall hate mail episodes because we're talking about religion and people don't like to talk about this thing, right.

Preston Meyer  40:49

And so that's it for this week. Peace be with you.

Katie Dooley  40:54

Settle down. That's all for this week. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review and five stars. And until next time, peace

Preston Meyer  41:04

be with you.

In this episode, we take a closer look at the complex concepts of gods and worship. We start by defining God and then discuss how historical figures, like George Washington, have been worshipped in certain situations. We also explore the historical practice of deification, focusing on the worship of emperors and monarchs.

Moving on, we discuss divine intervention in American history and how historical figures are sometimes treated like deities. Our perspectives on worship highlight its submissive nature and stress the importance of having a real connection to a deity or hero.

We touch on monotheism and the challenges it poses, examining the history of religious leaders being treated as gods. Lastly, we explore various gods and entities, including the portrayal of ancient gods in modern times, and discuss the potential problems associated with excessive or harmful worship practices.

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**

Katie Dooley  00:11

Alright, welcome to the next episode of The Holy watermelon podcast. Preston, what are we talking about today? Because it's all you,

Preston Meyer  00:21

we are talking about what is it God? And without looking at our show notes, what do you How would you describe or define a god?

Katie Dooley  00:30

Oh, no. I would describe a god as an invisible being that controls our lives. So pretty strong Yes. Yes, that has some sort of control over the outcomes of things, life. Stuff we pray for and asked to happen. Okay, outcomes of the Superbowl and whether we're gonna get a rain for harvest. Okay.

Preston Meyer  01:12

But it has to be invisible. Does it have to be here?

Katie Dooley  01:17

No, it definitely doesn't have to be here. But that's just the feminist in me. And I don't know of any visible Gods unless we're talking about

Preston Meyer  01:28

idols. What about George Washington? I

Katie Dooley  01:31

wouldn't consider him because

Preston Meyer  01:35

believe it or not a lot of people do.

Katie Dooley  01:40

Oh, wasn't his slave owner?

Preston Meyer  01:43

He was a slave owner. That's okay. Yeah, absolutely. Back in a time when that was the economic norm. If you had any sort of power at all, you definitely own somebody.

Katie Dooley  01:57

I mean, back in

Preston Meyer  01:58

those days, that's the way it was still on people. Right? I mean, you can get a slave from Africa for 400 bucks. cheaper if you, you know, hunt around a little better than the average person grows. We don't condone slavery, no, slavery is bad. Owning another person treating them as property instead of a person is definitely not okay. And there's a reason it's not normal anymore. But it used to be. And that sucks. But absolutely, George Washington is worshipped as a god, if you go to Washington, DC, there's this huge painting. And I wish I can remember the the name of the building it's in. There's somebody out there who'd be happy to share that information of the deification is huge painting of George Washington becoming a god. And there's a shrine in Hawaii of all places, that has a portion of it dedicated to George Washington. It's also very close to a nearly identical shrine for Abraham Lincoln, who was also worshipped as a god. It does not seem weird.

Katie Dooley  03:10

It does. It sounds like anyone or anything could be a god. And I know. For poor listeners, the next few episodes are going to be very big and very vague with no answer. So we're just going to talk around what a god is for the next 45 minutes to lay the foundation for the next episodes because this is information that although there's no answer to people need to know,

Preston Meyer  03:38

a religion can't exist without these ideas, whether they use the same vocabulary there has to be in some measure these ideas

Katie Dooley  03:47

and that's the worship of person, place or thing, right.

Preston Meyer  03:51

The worship of a noun object.

Katie Dooley  03:57

Yeah, an object.

Preston Meyer  03:59

Yeah, yeah. Yeah,

Katie Dooley  04:01

you just need to be a noun. Should we replace the word God with a noun? Like what? No, just like noun. So thank God. Oh, my Oh my God. Oh, my noun. I mean, that's a t shirt idea. Doesn't go in the opposite Brian, just remind me Oh, my noun. Oh, my noun.

Preston Meyer  04:19

So a quick Google search, which I've done more than once as I've taken Theology and Religious Studies in the university

Katie Dooley  04:32

Preston goes to the computer what

Preston Meyer  04:34

is so much of education is it might not start with a googling but it will definitely include a googling

Katie Dooley  04:42

this sounds like such a newbie question right but it got

Preston Meyer  04:46

well and for a lot of boys that's how they're gonna get any sort of answer from that question and a Google search of God I mean, you're gonna get the Judeo Christian God come up for sure because the English speaking world, mostly Judeo Christian. But that the definition also includes the idea that a god is anything that is worshipped, which could be a hero, a champion of an emperor, almost every Emperor is worshipped as a god, if you look back historically, they had a cult around their personality, which is a little creepy, but also a great way to keep control over your empire.

Katie Dooley  05:26

I imagine, I don't know, I haven't done any research into especially in Egyptian gods, those are probably all pass emperors. Not all

Preston Meyer  05:35

of them, but definitely many of them. There was the cult, immediately surrounding the Pharaoh, the pharaoh was absolutely worshipped as a god a little bit more intensely than a lot of other national religions. But a really cool example, to investigate and dig deep into Egyptian religion is also not a static thing. Things change from generation to generation. And over long periods of time, they changed a lot, which is why it's less weird to look at George Washington and see that he was worshipped as a god, actually.

Katie Dooley  06:08

I mean, I immediately think of and still probably the most modern idea that our monarchs have divine right? Absolutely. So in a country like the United States that by the time George Washington came around, didn't have a monarch, I imagine there'd be people who still believe that he had some divine right to lead and that there was some divine intervention in them winning the revolution under George Washington. Absolutely. I guess that's less of a stretch. But most

Preston Meyer  06:41

Americans genuinely believe that there was something very special and divine about the coming about of the American Revolution. There's the whole idea of what's the word now. Manifest Destiny, that the idea that we're here and we're awesome, because that was always meant to be, which I mean, every religion relies on that idea a little bit though most of them are going to say it the way American propaganda put it into print very strongly. But where was I going? Lost it.

Katie Dooley  07:18

Manifest Destiny and divine this around? Oh, yeah. Yeah, to mention for the revolution,

Preston Meyer  07:24

so most Americans buy into it, completely. Immigrants even usually love it, then it's it's all part of that idea of the American dream. Christians usually will ascribe some measure of revelatory power that helped the Founding Fathers build America, and then the Mormons straight up, would teach actively, that God inspired the founding fathers to create, which is sounds a little bit weird. But also, if you believe in God, it's relatively easy to believe that a country that ended up being so great and powerful, did get help.

Katie Dooley  08:03

I can see the, the belief that there was some divine intervention, right? I mean, people pray for a Super Bowl win. So if your team wins, and yeah, you might believe that there's some divine intervention. I just, it's harder for me to comprehend the jump from a divine intervention to George Washington is a deity worth of worship, like you don't go to church on Sunday to your you're not a Washington night. And you go and you pray to George Washington that your kids get to be healthier and get an A on their test, in the same way, but I guess that's where we're gonna dive into what is a God if you venerate a person? And there are idols of these people? Does that elevate them to God status Preston?

Preston Meyer  08:55

So the real question that we can't say all of you have to believe one single answer that I got can be literally anything but in the field of Religious Studies of a thing is worshipped as a god. We can't say that it's not a god. It's you

Katie Dooley  09:15

define what worship is?

Preston Meyer  09:17

I think we absolutely do have to define what worship is because this could get real weird real fast. Yeah. So what do you think worship? What what constitutes worship? Watch,

Katie Dooley  09:30

this is good to come up with a worship my dog or something weird. Totally AM. Worship trying to think in terms of Western religion. Sure. Because all those I'm an atheist. We're in Canada. So most people are familiar with worship. So it's definitely something elevated. Something that you like worship, I guess,

Preston Meyer  09:55

you can't use the word worship and your definition. To

Katie Dooley  09:58

worship is when you Worship in some ways, I don't see that it's something you're submissive to, right. So you're you're praying, you're asking for guidance or a specific outcome, you definitely think they have control over your life and your immediate outcomes. So again, back to like the Super Bowl, or but also after life outcome, and that if you do what the god entity deity wants, those good things will come to you.

Preston Meyer  10:37

Okay, so how about four year old Katie looking up to dad? Is that interesting?

Katie Dooley  10:47

Yeah, interesting. Oh, creepy. borderline creepy. But yeah, I guess that does fit that definition. And if anyone knows me and my dog, I'm definitely she's the alpha. So whatever she wants, she gets in hopes that she doesn't murder me in my sleep.

Preston Meyer  11:09

So when looking at Gods and what is it, God helps a lot to have something concrete, to have a connection to that God, you've got your heroes. For example, you look at the way you see people behave in superhero movies, and the way they react to their superheroes. They either see them as scary villains, or even if they're good, or they see them as gods, people who have great power, who deserve veneration. And an awful lot of the gods that we see in various national pantheons started out that way. An excellent example of a mortal person who came to be worshipped as a god is Jesus. There's there's no way around that he was a moral person, he died. He is currently worshipped as a god. Pretty solid example. There's also examples like Zeus, there's not a whole lot of strong reason to believe that he was a historical figure. Everything we know about him comes from stories that are far outside of what we expect to be human behavior. But they are classic literature. And we can talk on another occasion on how the Iliad and the other writings of Homer and other Greek poets are pretty much analogous with the Hebrew Bible. It's just a national library. But there is a place in 90% Sure, it's the city of Crete where Zeus has a a tomb, that is said to be this is where Zeus is buried. And it's, that's what I'm looking for. Oh, hello. The hits. It's not an exception to the rule that most Gods either were people or they are simply anthropomorphized phenomena. Like you've got gods of the rain. This is especially well illustrated in old nope, old Japanese commie. That's you've got the spirit of the river, you got the spirit of the rain, you got the spirit of the earth, you have the spirit of mountain Fuji, you've got all these spirits, that we we call them commie because that's the word used in Japanese that means spirit or God or anything in between. There is a distinction, but it's not transmitted very effectively through the one word that you use to cover the whole umbrella. It's a little bit weird. And if I knew more about the Shintoism, and Japanese national religion, I'm sure I could answer questions about that better. But commies are a pretty good example of that. You've got even Mesopotamia, there's gods of the river. Things like that. Pretty standard here in North America, the local Native Americans, they have bear worship, for example, among countless other things. There's a spirit that is manifested in the bear. And then you've got gods of ideas, which aren't terribly different from Gods of this river in the mountain. But like, you've got chaos gods, you've got trickster gods, many of whom probably were actually people. But that's a

Katie Dooley  14:44

tricky thing to explore. And that's a Greek one, isn't it? Oh,

Preston Meyer  14:47

there's god of wine. Yeah, gotta drink a God of hallucinogens, more or less. And I wish I can remember his name right now. He was played by Stanley Tucci in the Percy Jackson Movie.

Katie Dooley  14:59

Is googling.

Preston Meyer  15:01

Oh man, it bugs me that I can't remember his name. I took a class on Greek mythology. As part of my degree. I enjoyed it. And I can't remember his name right now.

Katie Dooley  15:13

I'm on it. I'm on it.

Preston Meyer  15:15

It's gonna be really unhelpful if I'm wrong about him being played by Stanley Tucci. Diagnosis,

Katie Dooley  15:22

that's what I thought it was. But I didn't want to say it.

Preston Meyer  15:25

I'm embarrassed how long it took me to remember it because I've talked about diagnosis a few times, in present presenting to my classes and whatnot. And I actually really love their portrayal of him in Percy Jackson, based on the movie I have read, none of the books and I've only seen the two movies that I recognize most people hate. But I love that version of Dionysus, who can't get drunk anymore. He's, you know, AAA or whatever. And so he pours himself a glass of wine and turns into water. And there's some sort of lament about, you know, there's this other guy who can do the exact opposite Jesus. And so there's, you know, he's the God of revelry, and good times and whatnot, his party was back in the day would have been the biggest, most insane, fun that definitely would have transitioned, at some point into celebrating Aphrodite and a big old orgy, maybe I'm feeling confident that was good I can,

Katie Dooley  16:30

I can see how that can start as a real person who just had like

Preston Meyer  16:35

parties, and when you would have these parties to get him to come? Yeah, which definitely would have started while he was alive. And then

Katie Dooley  16:43

funeral would have been a big party in honor of, and

Preston Meyer  16:46

then just keep doing it every year. And there's, there's loads of gods that are like that, a lot of the gods that we can look back in history, we think we're probably people, a lot of them probably weren't. And they're just this idea of this, this element that became deified to to explain it to currents, like the lightning that eventually turned into a person like Thor, for example. Was he a person we straight up don't know. Odin, probably was, there's loads and loads and loads of material written over the centuries on this topic of need to read the word so I can say it properly. Loads of things written on you hemmer ism, which is this old word named after this old dude, who tried to explain how people became Gods after they died, or even sometimes before they died, and how these gods that we look at now we're actually people, and there's, there's loads of different people. There's loads of different reasons why a person would be deified. You've got teachers like Confucius, most people are looking look at Confucianism. Don't venerate him as a person of worship, in the way that we see worship in the Judeo Christian tradition. But if you're going to repeat something, that dude says for 1000s of yours, and get mad when somebody says this person's a fool, there's a degree of worship there.

Katie Dooley  18:25

Well, that's, but that's an interesting point to this idea that God is quite a broad term, which has, I mean, we were talking politics a little bit before we press play. And yeah, sometimes people are passionate about who their political leader is, whatever side you're on, and you get mad when someone disagrees. So are like worship, that I don't like that idea of worshipping these political party leaders bus, right?

Preston Meyer  18:56

Well, for example, yum. There's videos circulating on the internet, as there always is of Trump rallies. And you've got these dudes with shirts on, that are hoping and they're illustrating on the shirts of a dynasty of Trumps. You got Donald for four more years, and then Ivanka for eight years, immediately after, and then Donald Jr. Immediately after that for eight more years. And eventually, when Baron is old enough, get him for eight more years. And that's worship. The idea that Donald Trump is the best possible President America could ever have, and that nobody else or no other family should ever hold that office. That's worship. It's a dangerous, democracy destroying kind of turd, worship. Worship, I like that. And I bet you If you were to go and look through that chart I showed you of all of the different gods and how they're categorized a bunch of there's a turd God. somewhere, somewhere in the world some point in history scab

Katie Dooley  20:11

and ISIS. Sure.

Preston Meyer  20:15

I feel like there's a God who's responsible for making sure the latrines don't stink to bed or something, something connected.

Katie Dooley  20:23

I think that that's probably, yeah, how other gods started and said, that was not saying Trump's a great leader, but that there was a great leader that people sort of wanted to continue, especially in the time sort of before democracy when monarchs again divine right were more common. Yeah,

Preston Meyer  20:44

there's, there's all kinds of leaders, there's teachers, like, like I mentioned before, you've got military leaders, there's Chinese fella that I appear to have failed to record his name. I wrote him into my paper. There's there's Chinese generals that have been established as Gods after they died, even just because they fought against a power, even having lost their battles. They what they stood for, it became so important to the people that they said, Yeah, this person will be deified. Which seems super weird in a Western worldview. But that's a thing that happened.

Katie Dooley  21:33

But I immediately think being knighted by the Queen and also Catholic saints, especially in Catholicism, because you can worship someone. I think it's kind of odd, but in this sort of denomination of Christianity where it's okay to pray to a saint in a monotheistic religion. Yeah, I'm sure we'll get into that in a different episode. monotheism

Preston Meyer  21:55

is a tricky, tricky, tricky beast. That

Katie Dooley  22:01

is it because of the Trinity.

Preston Meyer  22:04

Honestly, the Christian monotheism makes no sense at all. There's no way you can defend it. It doesn't work

Katie Dooley  22:12

because of the Trinity. Yeah.

Preston Meyer  22:16

Jewish monotheism, the way it's been explained to me is, you've got one God, and that's the deal. There is no split next to it. Now, these ancient Israelite religion absolutely had a huge number of Gods so yeah, and then the exile around 600 ish BC, they very quickly modified their religion, to focus on one God while they lived in a world surrounded daily by people who really wanted them to not worship anything of their own, but worship Babylonian gods. So, history is super exciting. They're fun to look into. If you like the history of religion.

Katie Dooley  23:04

If you don't like the history of religion, you're listening to their own podcast. I know it's a laugh, so to butt. Heads up. It's coming.

Preston Meyer  23:16

And yes, you've got teachers, you've got military leaders and Emperor's, like I said before, almost every Emperor has been worshipped as a god. That includes Pope's

Katie Dooley  23:29

do we get a worship? Queen Elizabeth?

Preston Meyer  23:32

Absolutely. Yes, I like I am 100% certain that there are people who worship Queen Elizabeth, though it is actively discouraged in the Church of England of which she is the head. There are people who absolutely worship her. And I mean, it helps that she's been the queen for longer than my parents have been alive.

Katie Dooley  23:53

She was for coronated quarantine. The year my mom was born and my mom just turned to her mom 68 So she's been clean for 60 a long time. And I don't know if we're keeping this in Brian might be like, this is completely irrelevant. But I think I mean, little bit to the point of worship and worshiping the queen I mentioned to someone, you know, it won't be long before she's not on our $20 Bill anymore, not on our coins. And they said well, you can't take Queen Elizabeth all our coins. I said, Yeah, I can. We used to have to King George on there. And then George died and we put on Queen Elizabeth like, my grandpa was a coin collector. He had some coins with King George on it. It's just because after 68 years, nobody can imagine. Charles $20 bill but it's coming mean Elizabeth is old as balls. And I that might be a really great example of worship. If she does stay and I am not the Bank of Canada. I don't know who's in charge of this. But some people have said well, maybe they'll just keep her on the money because she's been on my Memphis along.

Preston Meyer  25:00

I really look forward to the day we have the kid from Mad Magazine on the back of the loony.

Katie Dooley  25:14

It's so true. I actually am. I mean, I don't want Queloz dies. He's pretty cool. But she has all those balls. I would love to see Charles on the money just for a shake up after I'm only 30. But like my mom's entire life, the Queen's been on her money. So let's have a shake. That was But Charles on it. Yeah, that's a modern example of when I'm like, Well, what happens when Charles goes on our money? I was like, don't happen. Yes, it probably will happen. Well, that's,

Preston Meyer  25:43

she's she's not on our money by virtue of Oh, yeah. She's super cool. Or by state in forest worship. She's there because she's the monarch, she will be replaced.

Katie Dooley  25:57

Last year is actually a lizard person and lose forever, which is another feat.

Preston Meyer  26:00

Yeah. For those conspiracy folks are right. And they're not a small number, which is embarrassing. But if, if they're right, then yeah, so probably between her but a lot longer to see your actual lizard face and put that on the money. Well, she can only go so long before she asked to reveal it. Right. Yeah.

Katie Dooley  26:22

I mean, she keeps shedding her skin eventually your lizard faces. Human body that she procured 68 years ago will eventually deteriorate? Yeah. So just back to the question, what is a God is there? I guess? I mean, clearly, there's no official definition. But there is a difference between my dad and the Queen, and Jesus. Right, or, you know, God, capital G.

Preston Meyer  26:55

But there's differences between Loki and Thor and Odin as well. And they're all worshipped as gods, though the worship of Loki is odd, especially to a culture where we want to worship a God that we expect to be righteous. Loki is never seen as a righteous figure.

Katie Dooley  27:15

I guess what I'm saying is, we worship the latter ones I listed on mass, and we have buildings dedicated right people, whereas there is not a building or shrine dedicated to daddy, Julie. Katie's Dad, I don't know if I want my last name on the podcast, right? And where am I? Right? It's not something we, you know, write literature about, and we don't pay tax or tithe to these people. So there is, but you care for them? I do and I buy him Christmas presents. Is

Preston Meyer  27:57

that not an offering even a sacrifice? Oh?

Katie Dooley  28:05

Yes, but how can you haven't got my dad a Christmas present, then?

Preston Meyer  28:10

Because I don't wish what and worship is in respect to things are more broadly recognized as the gods have just very often regionalised or localized?

Katie Dooley  28:22

You've got hyper localized family of five? Absolutely.

Preston Meyer  28:26

There's, if you look in the Middle East, for example, back 4000 years, you there's archaeological evidence of gods who are worshipped just in one town. Right? There's, there's loads of those very local gods. The Bible actually has words talking about household gods. So they were more likely more slightly more recent ancestors that were just past the cusp of memory.

Katie Dooley  28:58

Well, and I use ancestors, and that immediately makes me think of Chinese families that talk to their ancestors. So you don't even need to be you can be recently did. Right. And ancestor worship is Yeah, somebody asked you for things that they need. Yeah.

Preston Meyer  29:16

Hmm. Ancestor worship is pretty much normal around the world, based on the structure of the word. I like to do that sometimes dig into Etymology and where words come from, you worship something if you declare by word or by action that it has worth, which sounds way too broad,

Katie Dooley  29:43

vastly too broad, then I worship chocolate.

Preston Meyer  29:48

Right. And so we do have to, we have to narrow that in just a little bit. And the real question is, how much can you narrow it in before your definition? Isn't isn't right, the same question but has bothered academics for ages on what is religion except is that everyone you narrow it in too much you've got nobody but Christians which is a Christian anthropologists dealt with it for a while and that has caused its own problems. So narrowing in worship is tricky like the dollar has value that's the whole reason that it exists but the worship of the dollar there are people who live their lives around the dollar like it is their god some workaholics That's

Katie Dooley  30:41

the deal. Almost every Christmas movie is based off of that

Preston Meyer  30:45

is true like your Hallmark Christmas movies. The the first half of the movie is money. The second half of the movie is skipping that money man I wish I hadn't been worshipping money. And but it's a fun example because it's it's a thing that on the on the surface base level broad definition of worship doesn't apply

Katie Dooley  31:09

when money is universal. So everyone can kind of use this as a baseline. It's an

Preston Meyer  31:13

easy baseline to hit. But then you've got people who straight up do worship not not the dollar bill itself, but the accumulation of wealth. There's I haven't looked into it, there's probably more than one god that represents the accumulation of wealth. Half of our dragon stories. That's what that's what they are.

Katie Dooley  31:37

Dragons money.

Preston Meyer  31:38

Yeah, that's just sit on their pile of gold and tell you to piss off. Anytime you come looking for trouble.

Katie Dooley  31:49

Good old dragon.

Preston Meyer  31:49

The idea of God is just so broad. It's really tricky.

Katie Dooley  31:54

Yeah, like I said, this is an episode of this talking around an answer not actually getting to one.

Preston Meyer  32:01

Yeah. Every religion has an official. This is what Gods are there, boy. Yeah, pretty much like Christianity. Obviously. You've got Jesus, the other two gods of Christianity.

Katie Dooley  32:16

And then a whole bunch states if you're Catholic.

Preston Meyer  32:18

Oh, yeah. That's I mean, even

Katie Dooley  32:21

Mormonism arguably Joseph Smith, in a little bit, Brigham Young.

Preston Meyer  32:26

I mean, that's that's the tricky thing is just like the Anglican say, Don't worship the queen. Mormons do say don't worship Joseph Smith don't worship Brigham Young, don't worship Russell Nelson. But there is absolutely a level of hero worship. You venerate that person as having accomplished this thing. Or having been a good teacher or eggs, acknowledged the is particularly in Mormonism, the idea that they should be deified in the next life. But, and worshipping them is a tricky thing. But how,

Katie Dooley  33:05

how do you not and right, and there's a lot of I mean, this is almost every religion, right? You have Islam and Muhammad you have every denomination of Christianity, Martin Luther Lutherans, and even probably Moses in Judaism as they are the founders or you know, they took that tangent that whatever religion needed to take. So how do you not venerate them? To some extent? Or, or even the, you know, the Pope is, you know, the mouthpiece of God, how do you not

Preston Meyer  33:42

to deny them on a pedestal is insane, right? Yeah.

Katie Dooley  33:47

Absolutely. But they're even then there's still a separation between them. And yeah, I mean, these examples, the Judeo Christian gods.

Preston Meyer  33:58

Yeah. Religion is tricky. Yeah. And that's why

Katie Dooley  34:01

we're talking about it because people don't have these conversations. Right. And I think maybe quickly to wrap up is perhaps when is worship dangerous or whatever. So and we'll we're going to do a full episode on cults. Or maybe in not even the realm of cults. But when does worship go too far? There were I don't know if there were confirmed allegations that you know, Pope John Paul flogged himself. Is that worship gone too far? Yeah, so the clearly there's varying degrees of worship and at some point, it becomes religious and maybe that's the defining factor and I don't want to get say anything too concrete, but whatever. We worship money, we worship our friends and family. Katie worships her dog. But at some point, it becomes so devotional. My dog's coughing in the background. It becomes so devotional that now sir It takes that pivot to religion. And then there's probably another pivot where actually becomes dangerous and you're harming yourself and or others thoughts.

Preston Meyer  35:11

I liked the phrase devotional worship, for example, worshipping the dollar. Not a thing that people do like as far as worshiping this pile of coins in my hand that makes up $1. Devotional sounds

Katie Dooley  35:24

conscientious, you're like, yeah, get my dad a birthday present. I hope he's gonna give me a better birthday present, because he's my daddy. But it's not like conscious, I'm going to constantly give and give and whatever I submit myself for,

Preston Meyer  35:45

that's the exact same the relationship you just described, exchanging gifts with your father. That's the way most Christians look at their relationship with God. Yeah, you offer your devotions, which is, in many religions, nothing more than prayer. And so I

Katie Dooley  36:00

guess I'd say it's like routine. And it's, it's very conscientious, where, you know, if my dad didn't give me a birthday present, and be like, Okay,

Preston Meyer  36:09

that's a bummer.

Katie Dooley  36:11

That's a bummer. But this is like, yeah, I guess conscientious. And then there's like, obviously, there's like this afterlife piece to it. which no one can know. There's

Preston Meyer  36:23

no solid evidence.

Katie Dooley  36:27

Rats. Yeah, I think there's like this, this routine, devotional, conscientious aspect to it that's different than, you know, some of these sort of everyday relationships we're talking about. And then there's this danger point, probably along the way. Yeah, I

Preston Meyer  36:48

think worship is definitely defined by the way it affects your behavior. Like, the way you treat your dog is different than the way you'll treat the money in your wallet, you will happily part with the money in your wallet, knowing that more will come. And you'll get something in exchange for that. partying with Paige is going to suck when that happens.

Katie Dooley  37:13

I just say one day, she's gonna move out.

Preston Meyer  37:18

And that helps make things easier. And if you look at the story of Jesus, for example, in the book of Acts, he moved out. I mean, he died, he came back, so we're gonna skip that part of the story. But then he just took off into the clouds, right. So he's

Katie Dooley  37:37

I don't know anyone that's moved out like that before. And I yeah, that brings obviously a level of comfort to people knowing that he will come back one day, and you'll get to see him at the end of all things. Maybe.

Preston Meyer  37:52

That's the story. That's the hope. Yeah.

Katie Dooley  37:57

Talking about time that devote

Preston Meyer  37:59

your life. Yeah. So a lot of your worship of the old, the old gods, the god of thunder, the God of the river that really affected your life and you would behave in particular ways to help the way that affected your life. You would pray that the river would not dry up because sometimes they would you pray for the rain to come because sometimes it wouldn't you pray for the lightning not to come because that keeps setting your house on fire. That's a personal, deeply personal issue.

Katie Dooley  38:27

Yes, you getting electrocuted is a deeply personal issue.

Preston Meyer  38:33

Yeah, well, I mean, and also having your little grass huts set on fire that blows that in dangers more than just you. So lightning, hella bad. And so you would pray for god of thunder lightning, whichever, like Thor, to not strike your home or your village or your crops. You would have Gods like Hades, who is villainized way more than he should be? The Hercules movie is terrible. Because historically, Zeus is a dickbag raping any pretty girl as

Katie Dooley  39:07

a swan goose I was gonna say she Yeah. And then

Preston Meyer  39:11

he's taken loads of shapes and raved lower than just humans.

Katie Dooley  39:17

Oh, by

Preston Meyer  39:20

the way, they treat Hera in that movie is honestly super disappointing that Hercules movie could have been way more fun. And Hades is never a bad guy. The story of the rape of Persephone, if you read the story, he never rapes her based on the current definition of rape. He seduced her and convinced her to come live with him. That's not different than most relationships today.

Katie Dooley  39:50

mean that's why I'm here.

Preston Meyer  39:54

My relationship isn't wildly different. I

Katie Dooley  39:57

used to do so she Cities.

Preston Meyer  40:00

I feel like there was a lot of effort both ways, which is why it worked.

Katie Dooley  40:05

Yes, stay tuned for our podcasts on relationships cool.

Preston Meyer  40:11

But so, Hades is the keeper of the dead. He's not Santos, the, the god of death. He is the keeper of the dead and also of various other elements of the underground. And so he would be a God that is prayed to to preserve and care for your departed dead, like great, great grandma, things like that. And absolutely should not have been the villain of their Kilis movie. Zeus is far easier to villainize because we know well enough that we should villainize right.

Katie Dooley  40:47

So what's Preston is saying between Percy Jackson and Disney movies is don't get your religious education, from movies.

Preston Meyer  40:56

And we'll talk about popular culture and religion later. Greek religion is well, one not monolithic, and to always poorly represented in popular culture, but we like to romanticize things, it's to a Christian based population, it's kind of important that we stick with the narrative of God is good. And so Zeus being the God of the gods, has to be a good guy. And so he's so jovial and bright orange and whatnot, and actually looks a little too much like Trump in the Disney movie, in the Disney movie, whereas you've got Satan who because he lives underground in Dante's Divine Comedy. He has to be a parallel to Hades who therefore must be evil. So popular culture really messes with religion, and actually changes religion, which I'm straying too far from our current topic of gods can be literally anything. And they are changeable. You've got all kinds of gods who are seen as one thing in one place and seen as something else somewhere else. You've got gods who are deified before they die, you've got gods who are deified centuries after they've died. The little less common but has actually happened. And literally anything can be a god, literally anything can be worshipped to that devotional religious level. And most of it shouldn't be. I mean, it's super easy to say none of it should be worshipped to every religious devotional level. I feel like that's your position. But there are things that drive us to be better. Absolutely. And I feel like that is something that is a little harder to discourage.

Katie Dooley  43:13

I, I guess that sort of goes back to my previous point, of anything taken too far.

Preston Meyer  43:22

Absolutely. I mean, that's part of the phrase too far. You can take it so far. And it still be okay. Like, even if you worship Xenu I mean, it's something I have a hard time defending the whole religion that built up Xenu is a topic for another day. Yeah, to the

Katie Dooley  43:41

point where you, you know, XENU exists, you've gone too far. Yeah, it's like 10 $50,000 to figure out anyways, another day. And maybe I feel like we need to do a full episode on worship, because there's so many varying degrees of worship, and different types of worship, and that it'll just be an interesting sort of cultural snapshot. But yeah, anything taken too far as bad. Anything can be a god.

Preston Meyer  44:11

What about Albert Einstein?

Katie Dooley  44:14

What about?

Preston Meyer  44:17

I'm very confident that the veneration that is heaped upon him, counts as devotional worship,

Katie Dooley  44:25

probably and I actually, perhaps even lump Addison in there because he didn't even figure it out. Tesla did.

Preston Meyer  44:34

Yeah, Edison definitely has a lot that I can't say fair share of worship, because it's definitely not fair that he has accrued a lot more worship than he ever deserved. But

Katie Dooley  44:51

I wonder I don't know enough about Thomas Edison. That's not my wheelhouse, but sort of same idea.

Preston Meyer  44:57

He paid for a lot of really good sign tends to be done. But he's not the genius that a lot of people like to write them up to be. There's a great episode of Doctor Who on that subject.

Katie Dooley  45:09

I guess my final points are, know what you're worshiping. Just be aware of what you're doing in your worship. Make sure not to hurt yourself or others. That sounds like a sex talk. Treat worshipping gods like sex, know what you're doing. Be ready.

Preston Meyer  45:34

Use protection, use

Katie Dooley  45:36

protection, check in occasionally make sure everything's still good. Not that you've gone too far or not enough, right? Because their spiritual well being even though I'm an atheist, that you need to take care of your spiritual well being make sure you're doing enough. Make sure not doing too much. Those are my final thoughts on worship. And no, we never answered what a god is. It can be anything. Whatever makes you happy and floats your boat, Flying Spaghetti Monster, love flying spaghetti monster, that's when I can actually get right.

Preston Meyer  46:05

He's as real as the God of the team's River. There's a god of the temperature. I guarantee it. If you were to look it up, you'd find his name or her. I'm going to be honest, I didn't look it up and can't say if it's male or female. But since every river in the old world has a god associated with it, you'll find one. Somewhere you might have to look for longer than this podcast has time and patience for old father 10s of school. That's his name. That's actually a reasonably common thing. But I couldn't feel confident enough to say yeah, that's totally it. Many rivers have the gods named right after the river. That's pretty normal. But a lot of God's rivers have their own independent name. There

Katie Dooley  46:50

is a statue of father Thames to see any final thoughts from you, Preston?

Preston Meyer  46:57

I have so many ideas that we've we've generated a lot of Gods on the idea of a land. Britannia, for example, is the god goddess. Britannia is the goddess of Britain, of Great Britain. I have to believe you on Portlandia.

Katie Dooley  47:17

There's a beautiful big statue over Borland. If you watch literally any

Preston Meyer  47:21

of the live action Spider Man movies, the first thing you see is the goddess Colombia, the goddess of North America, or maybe all of America, I'm pretty sure it's just north. But that's, that's the thing I'm gonna have to look up. But that's the thing. Colombia is the goddess of North America, or America. Columbia is the goddess of America. And that's a little bit weird, because guess where she got her name? Christopher Columbus, a total dick bag.

Katie Dooley  47:57

Total bag of dicks. But that makes the right that goes back to her to our points,

Preston Meyer  48:02

lots of dark blood, lots of dogs. Lots of gods are total big bags in and of themselves. And sometimes we romanticize them and create a whole new character that sometimes needs to be nothing like the original, including swapping genders. Gods are tricky. Gods can be literally anything, they can be a fiction created to cover an idea or represent an idea. And a god can be literally anything that you want to worship. If you want to worship the Flying Spaghetti Monster. That's your God. If you want to worship your dog, or a bag of beans, that's an option to you. And we will talk later about the God of sesame seeds.

Katie Dooley  48:50

Oh, I'm excited. All right, so stay tuned for our next episode. Next episode is going to be equally vague and vague on what is religion. Shalom. I don't remember how I signed off last time

Preston Meyer  49:09

with you

Is there a better place to start than the beginning? Where did religion come from? Is it inherent in us to be religious? Why does religion endure, isn't it outdated? There's lots of speculation about why and how religion started and why humans continue to be religious. 

In this first episode of the Holy Watermelon podcast, we discuss the different theories of how modern religion came about. Karen Armstrong’s book A History of God suggests that everyone worshipped a sky god until they needed more deities to explain how the world worked

Another theory, described in The Golden Bough by James George Frazer, talks about how we moved from magic to religion and then science. However, we’re in limbo between religion and science.

Magic, religion, and science are all ways to organize the world around us. As we’ve found more reasonable ways to organize the world, we move away more from magic and religion. We discuss how there is a pushback on science by some evangelical groups and the resurgence of magic in the last sixty years.

Is religion evolutionary? Are humans meant to be religious? 

Let’s explore. 

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Join the Community on Discord

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[00:00:10] Katie Dooley: Hello everyone and welcome to the first episode of the Holy Watermelon Podcast. My name is Katie.

[00:00:16] Preston Meyer: And I'm Preston.

[00:00:17] Katie Dooley: And today we are going to be talking about the beginning of modern religion.

[00:00:23] Preston Meyer: Well, do we want to talk about the beginning of modern religion?

[00:00:28] Katie Dooley: See, now it's weird. I'm like, "Sure do, Preston." Um, yeah, I guess let's talk about how modern religion started. You got to take the lead on this. Our resident scholar.

[00:00:41] Preston Meyer: So I read a book, well, actually, I pretended to read a book for one of my classes. I read the introduction, which was the book for one of my theology courses called "Thinking About God". It was written by Karen Armstrong. I'm pretty sure.

[00:01:01] Katie Dooley: Oh, she's written a few good books.

[00:01:02] Preston Meyer: She's written a lot. 

[00:01:03] Katie Dooley: Her Islam book is very good.

[00:01:04] Preston Meyer: A lot of people really like her, including the professor for that class and the intro for this book that I can't remember the name of off the top of my head right now talked about the idea that before we had all of these various religions that focused on multiple gods before there was this idea of magic, there was this sky God that everybody recognized as being the ultimate God. But nobody worshiped him. They just recognized that he is a creator. He's the sky God. And that's the deal. And they kind of, you know, would occasionally mention him when it was important. Like if something was happening in the skies, it'd be like, yep, that's the dude.

[00:01:49] Katie Dooley: Is it a History of God by Karen Armstrong?

[00:01:52] Preston Meyer: I bet you it is.

[00:01:53] Katie Dooley: Perfect. She writes a lot of great books on religion, so yeah, you'll hear her mentioned multiple times. There's also one called In the Beginning.

[00:02:01] Preston Meyer: That sounds cool. That's like the name of our episode maybe.

[00:02:06] Katie Dooley: Oh no, that's a Christian one. So it's definitely a history of God.

[00:02:11] Preston Meyer: I think it was a history of God. That does sound right. So in A History of God, she talks about this idea of and it's just a theory because there's no historical, concrete evidence that it's true that all people everywhere, or at least an awful lot of them, believed in this sky God without actually worshiping him, which is kind of interesting. Nothing ceremonial at all, but just knew he was there. Definitely recognized that he was a part of their lives. And then later, as the need came up to explain the universe around them, they came up with other gods, which is, I don't know. A familiar cop-out like the tooth fairy.

[00:02:54] Katie Dooley: Yeah, it's much like Santa Claus. How do I get my kids to behave?

[00:03:00] Preston Meyer: Right? Which works for December.

[00:03:02] Katie Dooley: And for, like, I don't know, from the ages of 3 to 10, like seven years.

[00:03:08] Preston Meyer: Yeah. And then people eventually figure out that Santa is not real. But Santa is real. He just died 2000 years ago. Well, almost 2000 years ago.

[00:03:20] Katie Dooley: That's a different episode.

[00:03:23] Preston Meyer: We can focus on Christmas later.

[00:03:25] Katie Dooley: Um, now, another cop-out from school is the book The Golden Bough, which I haven't read.

[00:03:33] Preston Meyer: I've heard of it. I've never read it.

[00:03:35] Katie Dooley: Maybe we should have read it for this podcast. But it talks about and I remember. Oh, I packed it. We're moving, but I packed it. Um, I remember when I took my introductory religious course, it talks about how civilization has moved from magic to religion, and it was supposed to move from religion to science, and maybe it still will. But we're in this sort of limbo where people still believe in both. But nobody, air quotes, believes in magic anymore. We don't use it to explain the universe.

[00:04:07] Preston Meyer: Which is a thing that I find really interesting, that, you know, if we look at primitive cultures, primitive, air quotes, that like, you know, an underexplored Africa or underexplored South America, you have people who are still very much into witchcraft and anthropologists have assumed for centuries that, well, obviously, because they're not as developed as we are, they represent our history. So we were all like that, which makes some sense. But it's also really hard to prove but it does make for very helpful examination of potential human development and helps us look at where we probably came from and where we ought to be going relative to that. But it's super weird that mostly 60s, 70s, that big hippie countercultural movement, saw a huge resurgence in magic. Wiccans, as we know them today were almost completely nonexistent in the 50s and yet magic is coming back too, for some reason, it may be because religion refuses to die. That's really hard to say. It could just be because people like pissing off their religious parents. And then that tradition continues on. There's a lot of guesses, and the people who really started the movement aren't really open to telling us why and how.

[00:05:36] Katie Dooley: I mean, some of the more modern examples of religion might be a good analysis of how religions come about, but I also find some of them odd in that... I mean, we were talking about Scientology before we pressed record, but, um, L. Ron Hubbard was a science fiction author, so I can't extrapolate how someone believes what a 1950s science fiction author that this is some religion or explanation of the universe. And I even struggle with, you know, Mormonism and that we had record keeping in the 1800s. It's something that could potentially be provable but there is no proof. Yeah. Yeah. I don't really know where I'm going with that point. Right. But it, you know things that have stuck in recent centuries, um, maybe a good place to look at how we as a civilization have become religious over time.

[00:06:36] Preston Meyer: Yeah. I think as it relates to, um, the whole magic religion science thing, one of the biggest things, and this might also explain the resurgence of Wicca and other witchcraft forms, is the idea of authority in science. You have authorities, people who have done lots of testing, who can prove to you this is my claim and this is why you should believe it because water does boil at 100°C.

[00:07:01] Katie Dooley: And it's peer-reviewed!

[00:07:02] Preston Meyer: Yeah. And so when you've proven yourself to a bunch of people who are also knowledgeable and understanding, that gives you a sense of authority, a very real authority as far as epistemological authority is the word which is just I have authority because I know a thing rather than I have authority because I stab your friends several times with a sword.

[00:07:28] Katie Dooley: As in previous um, centuries.

[00:07:34] Preston Meyer: And so that same sort of epistemological authority is claimed by religious leaders. And historically, let's look at Muhammad, for example. He killed an awful lot of people to show his authority over them and then taught them, having established his authority and then establishing his doctrine after. And there's there's loads more examples than just Muhammad, but he's a really.

[00:08:04] Katie Dooley: I think immediately of the Crusades. Right? Killed a bunch of people and then converted them.

[00:08:08] Preston Meyer: Right. Actually, that's even more recent. So I like it a little bit better. So you've got that sort of religious authority that often came at the point of a sword, but also occasionally in the example of Jesus did not come by the point of a sword, but he just let people know, hey, this is a thing. And the stories are that he healed people and established his authority that way. People were super interested in him because of the cool things he did, instead of the deadly things he did. And then he established his doctrine, which is a little closer to the preferable science that we like. And then magic the authority isn't the same sort of thing that we have with religion and science. You've got people who can accomplish things, and then as they continually accomplish things, they get revered as sages or as shamans or priests or whatever, or often long-lasting just elders and people go to them because they can accomplish things and because they know things, which is usually a lot more respected than authority won by the sword.

[00:09:22] Katie Dooley: I mean, it's probably more long-lasting. It's, you know, keeping your staff happy.

[00:09:28] Preston Meyer: Right? Good management. Right.

[00:09:31] Katie Dooley: It's just good. If you're a boss, keep your staff happy. Don't bully them. So it's a system of organization.

[00:09:42] Preston Meyer: Absolutely. Whatever your religion is. And like we say, magic's not religion. And science isn't religion. They are, uh, religion...

[00:09:52] Katie Dooley: That's our next episode.

[00:09:54] Preston Meyer: ...Is nearly impossible to define in a way that scholars can all universally agree.

[00:09:59] Katie Dooley: But we're going to try.

[00:10:00] Preston Meyer: We're gonna try, and hopefully that'll work out. Um, but religion in its most base etymological meaning is a way of organizing things and binding people together. And whether.

[00:10:15] Katie Dooley: That's, I mean.

[00:10:16] Preston Meyer: And it could be a good thing, it can be a bad thing.

[00:10:18] Katie Dooley: But also like, and we'll get into this next episode. But science is a way to organize the world, and I'm sure I'm not magical. We'll find a Wiccan one day. Magic is the way to organize the world, and probably even more on a personal level. But like your thoughts and how your life is supposed to go, and I'm sure we'll get into topics on things like marriage and children and sex. But even, you know, it sort of dictates that this is the way that makes sense to live your life and then the community and then the world.

[00:10:52] Preston Meyer: Exactly. So the way that that progression model works is that we're finding better, more reasonable ways to organize the world, because it turns out, as far as we can observe now, magic isn't reliable. Um, the old explanation for that is that there's so many intricate details to performing a spell, for example, that you just can't do it reliably when the other half of the argument is magic is nonsense because it straight up doesn't work. Um, and then religion, I mean, for example, the idea that God lives in the skies, we have concretely proven that's not the case. Otherwise we'd have God all over the front of our windscreens on our airplanes. That would be a huge problem. There's there's loads of.

[00:11:44] Katie Dooley: There's no one in the clouds. Right?

[00:11:46] Preston Meyer: There's loads of specific details that are super easy to disprove when you look at a religion, depending on what religion it is, some of them make no specific claims at all, which makes you wonder why they're making any sort of claims at all. And then others make loads of very specific claims that just don't hold up, even internally. When you look at the rest of the religion they've built. For example, um, I can't remember the name of the lady. She was Jesus of the Shakers.

[00:12:18] Katie Dooley: I know who you're talking about!

[00:12:20] Preston Meyer: She said that she was Jesus reborn, and she taught from the Bible at least a little bit. But the Bible does explicitly say that Jesus will come back in the exact same way that he left.

[00:12:34] Katie Dooley: Anne Lee

[00:12:35] Preston Meyer: Said that she was Jesus, even though she denied that she came into the world the same way Jesus left, which was up into the clouds. Mary Dyer was born of a woman. In the typical expected fashion. Head first probably. And so there's already at the very outset of all of her claims, a serious internal consistency issue.

[00:13:06] Katie Dooley: I feel like there's going to have to be an episode on people claiming to be Jesus.

[00:13:10] Oh, there are so many.

[00:13:11] Katie Dooley: I watched a wild documentary last. It was wild, I it was wild. Well, we'll do an episode on it, but that's all I can say. I couldn't... Mind blown.

[00:13:24] Preston Meyer: Back onto our main track. Right. Magic. Science. Religion, religion. Science. Magic. Religion, science. There's this ridiculous norm in the United States, and it's nowhere else in the world, just in the United States, and those cultures heavily influenced by them. So Alberta, for example, a lot of Canada, but not all of Canada start getting. There's a religious objection to all science. Um, most flat earthers are Christians. I don't know why, but most flat earthers are Christians, and most American Christians, especially the evangelicals, will deny almost anything that is published in a medical journal, even if it's peer-reviewed and proven. I think this mostly starts from the idea of evolution has to disprove theology. Um, which I mean, even the Vatican, the Pope has said that. Yeah, evolution could totally be the reality. The Bible doesn't say how God created what lives on the earth. He just says that he did. And to be real, that part of the Bible is meant explicitly for a temple. Short history of the world. Understand where your place is in the world. God is your creator and everything else. So it's all poetical, ritualistic narrative, anyway..

[00:14:58] Katie Dooley: Well, and to jump in the super old movie on the Scopes Monkey trial.

[00:15:02] Preston Meyer: No idea.

[00:15:03] Katie Dooley: I don't remember what's called Inherit the Wind? 

[00:15:07] Preston Meyer: I'm gonna Google that real quick.

[00:15:08] Katie Dooley: Google that real quick, Inherit the Wind, but.

[00:15:13] Preston Meyer: Just rely on our trusty editor.

[00:15:16] Katie Dooley: It's, uh. Yes, it's on the Scopes Monkey trial. I don't know if this was actually said in the Scopes Monkey trial. Um, or if it was just dramatic for Inherit the Wind. But the lawyer debating in favor of teaching evolution in schools says the Bible doesn't say how long the first day was. It could have been 10 million years.

[00:15:34] Preston Meyer: Well, especially since in the narrative in Genesis, the sun isn't created yet. To say that a day has to be 24 hours when there is no visible sun to rule. The night and the day is super weird.

[00:15:49] Katie Dooley: So absolutely. It's it's poetic. It's again, it's a way to organize and answer questions people have without having the tools we have now to explain it. Yeah, but back to your point on evangelicals believing.

[00:16:05] Preston Meyer: They will deny science at just like if you use the word science, it gets a whole bunch of people all worked up and their amygdala fires off, that they're being threatened because they perceive a war between science and religion. And an awful lot of scientists believe that that war is absolutely validated because most of their experience with religious people is crazy Christians who deny science, which is a problem.

[00:16:35] Katie Dooley: Well, I mean, we're definitely seeing that now. Absolutely. We're recording this on in 2020 because I don't actually know when it's gonna come out. So what I want to date ourselves. But recording 2020 in the middle of the, uh, coronavirus pandemic and the US has hundreds of thousands of cases. Uh, there's.

[00:16:56] Preston Meyer: More than 100,000 deaths.

[00:16:58] Katie Dooley: Yes, they have over 100,000.

[00:17:00] Preston Meyer: In just the United States.

[00:17:01] Katie Dooley: Um, and I mean, obviously, some of this is political and political policies. They don't have universal health care. But, you know, when you're being told to drink bleach, um, that is definitely a or not wear a mask or not social distance. That's definitely a science problem where people are listening to the experts.

[00:17:18] Preston Meyer: Yeah. And it's more Christians. And I'm going to pick on Christians here.

[00:17:24] Katie Dooley: He's allowed to. He is.

[00:17:24] Katie Dooley: I am a Christian, but I am not one of those Christians who is anti-science. And I feel no guilt picking on the anti-science Christians. They need to realize that science is a body of knowledge, as well as a method of proving that knowledge, which means there's loads of things that science will never prove. And there's lots of things that science will prove.

[00:17:52] Katie Dooley: I guess it's the problem comes from taking and and correct me as a religious person. Um, but taking everything as literal truth that when it gets contradicted now you can't pivot or else your entire world crumbles apart.

[00:18:10] Preston Meyer: There's there's loads of Christians. Um, so in from 2009 to 2011, I was a missionary actively teaching full-time every day of the week and no day job to support me. It was actually kind of nice to not have to worry about a job apart from teaching. I dealt with an awful lot of people who genuinely believed the Bible was written by God. Which I mean, if you've opened the book, that becomes very obvious that that's not the case, um, which actually is a segue into a cool topic for another day hoodoo, which is like voodoo, but not actually.

[00:18:47] Katie Dooley: I just heard this term recently. Yeah, I've never heard it before. And so it was on the internet. So I was being mocked for getting calling it, um, like a geographical formation. And then she shared the Wikipedia link to Hoodoo, and I was like interesting!

[00:19:02] Preston Meyer: So, um, to me, the most interesting, magical, um, groups are Voodoo and Hoodoo. And do you know the difference?

[00:19:11] Katie Dooley: Who don't because I didn't read that Wikipedia article.

[00:19:13] Preston Meyer: So Wikipedia article is quite lengthy and goes into loads of detail. Cliffs notes Hoodoo is Protestant to Voodoo's Catholic.

[00:19:24] Katie Dooley: Okay, yeah, okay.

[00:19:26] Preston Meyer: But not exactly like that one didn't break off from the other. Voodoo is... Voodoo is Catholic. Oh, Voodoo comes primarily from Haiti, which comes from Africa and exists because of Catholicism. In fact, it's the best example of what Catholicism is, because it takes an existing system and melds it into a new theology. So the voodoo had all these gods that could do all these crazy things and help people out a lot, and then when they said, okay, now you're Catholic, they're like, okay, so we have all these saints who have an awful lot of similarities with these gods, which is exactly the way they did it in Rome, not even the tiniest bit different. The Saints have just been amalgamated into these gods. And so sometimes I'll keep an old name like Baron Samedi. And sometimes, actually, that's not even a terribly ancient name. That's a French name. They'll and sometimes they'll have a new name like Saint Brigid, who is definitely an amalgamation with a previous Brigid. Kind of convenient that way. Names are the easiest way to amalgamate people, but sometimes you'll take aspects instead. And so you've got this multi-god saint Voodoo and they're really into dealing with the gods just like Christians, just like Catholics are way into dealing with saints. And we'll talk about what worship is a little bit later, because there's no valid claim that the praying and dealing with saints is not worship. Um, Hoodoo is directly derived from the same sort of magic people dealing with Protestants. They don't have saints. Protestantism is very anti-saint and or at least anti the model of Catholic saints. Yes, that's not good grammar. But I said what I said and so they, these magical people who are Hoodoo, they see the Bible that these Protestants wield and they declare great authority by having the book because you know, they never read it, just like the Hoodoo, almost never read it,

[00:21:55] Katie Dooley: Just like any religious person. Oh, there, there, I said it.

[00:21:58] Preston Meyer: There are way too many Christians who have no idea what's in the Bible. I actually had a conversation two days ago with a lovely fella. I never actually met him, but he's a relative of a friend of mine and we had a chat over Facebook, which is by its very nature very prone to explosion. Uh, he and I both did a great job of remaining civil. And then I ended the conversation when he said, there's nothing you can say that can change my mind. And I said, thanks for the conversation and goodbye. Essentially. Uh, but he was 100% convinced that the early Christian church had no interest in communism. And then I pointed to him the exact spots in the Book of Acts, the Acts of the Apostles where God or the church killed a family for not voluntarily being part of this communist system. They were told to sell their property. They did sell their property, but they kept a bunch of the money to themselves and only gave a little bit to the church. They were killed for it. That is forced communism. And when I explain that to him, uh, he didn't like that at all, and I couldn't change his mind. It was very frustrating. But there's loads and loads of Christians who have no idea what's in the Bible.

[00:23:20] Katie Dooley: Well, and I mean, this is going to be probably a multi-part episode when we do tackle the Bible, but I, I mean, even if you have read the Bible, there's, I mean, dozens if not hundreds of versions of the Bible, plus your own personal interpretation. Well, we'll get there.

[00:23:39] Preston Meyer: There are hundreds of textual variants in Greek that we have more than 100 translations in English of the Bible.

[00:23:45] Katie Dooley: Somebody I was somebody had it in their Instagram bio. They had I don't remember what it was, but they had cited a Bible quote and I was just curious what it was. So I just put it in and googled it. And the website I found had every different version.

[00:24:02] Preston Meyer: Bible Gateway is a great tool.

[00:24:05] Katie Dooley: That's probably exactly what it was, and I just couldn't believe the variations from passage to passage, like totally different meanings. So yeah.

[00:24:14] Preston Meyer: So um, the Hoodoo, like many Christians, use the Bible just as a totem or a talisman. It's a beating stick as much as it's a thing to be read. Um, you can go into coastal United States along, along the east, and you'll find houses where there's Bible pages pasted behind the wallpaper for its protective powers.

[00:24:42] Katie Dooley: I'm remembering that comedian we saw that was beating the globe with a Bible to flatten it.

[00:24:52] Preston Meyer: For some reason, just the use of talismans and totems is incredibly ancient, that, um, that we've found loads of passages of scripture written on a piece of paper nail stuck through it and worn around the neck or in a pocket or thrown into a well as curses or protections to help people. And so Hoodoo and Voodoo are, for that reason, my favourite kind of magic community type thing, because they illustrate that really well, but also illustrate in a slightly alien way, the very natures of Catholicism and Protestantism. Yeah, that's more or less what I remember from there, The Faith Instinct. Do you want to talk about that?

[00:25:38] Katie Dooley: I do want to talk about The Faith Instinct, because I still don't know if I agree with you. 

[00:25:43] Preston Meyer: Sure. That's fine.

[00:25:44] Katie Dooley: So I read a book called the Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures. So it was basically in the book saying that we are religious because of evolution. So just like we have two eyes and two hands and people average between 5 and 6ft tall, it's all evolutionary. And some of it was very interesting and some of it I disagreed with. Let's maybe start on the parts that I, I could wrap my head around, and then we'll get into our fight. We won't fight. Um, it talked about how it was used as a system of organization, especially for nomadic [00:26:34] peoples like this is tens of thousands of years ago. Like [00:26:37] this is pre-Christian, pre-Roman. Um, this sky daddy, you were talking about, um. And how do you organize a society to behave a certain way for, for the betterment and survival of all? The book compared religion to language, which I disagreed with, and feel free to jump in at any time, but it's that he sort of said in the book that, uh, even if no one taught you how to speak, if your mom didn't sit down and go, mama, you would learn how to speak eventually. And that religion was the same, that if no one sat down and taught you religion, you'd be religious anyway. Which I disagree with because I wasn't sat down and taught religion and I'm not religious.

[00:27:22] Preston Meyer: I disagree with both of those two points.

[00:27:24] Katie Dooley: Well, we'll get there  and I am reminded, um, Ricky Gervais, the actor who's I relate to him because he's, he's like me and that he is an atheist, but he will protect you. He's happy to protect your right to be religious. Um, but he has said that, like, if kids weren't taught anything until 18, we'd have a way fewer religious people running around. But I see you're wanting to say something. So let's jump in.

[00:27:53] Preston Meyer: What was, where was...

[00:27:54] Katie Dooley: I was talking about speech and how that is evolutionary. But if someone doesn't sit down and teach a religion, you probably obviously there are exceptions to the rule. I'm sitting with one, but you probably won't be religious.

[00:28:07] Preston Meyer: See my definition of religion that I mentioned earlier.

[00:28:10] Katie Dooley: Okay, let's let's. Keep it in terms of organized mainstream religion,

[00:28:16] Preston Meyer: If nobody teaches you to worship a specific god, you're not going to start doing it out of nowhere. That doesn't that doesn't make sense. It doesn't logically follow that you have to have somebody tell you that this individual is worth worshiping. It's a lot harder when that being doesn't exist. So somebody's going to have to tell you. Now, if you know, Odin all of a sudden is real and isn't just a mortal man, but a god, and he comes to you and displays his power, you're probably going to start worshiping him. So there is that. Absolutely. You do need to be taught religion to be part of that religion. But as far as the whole authoritative leadership of an organized group, I mean, we straight up can't survive without it. Evolutionarily speaking, we absolutely do need to be religious in that aspect.

[00:29:10] Katie Dooley: Yes and but that can come as simple as your mom or dad's the boss, right?

[00:29:13] Preston Meyer: Yeah in fact, that's usually the deal.

[00:29:16] Katie Dooley: Yeah. It's usually how we learn it. And if your mom and dad's boss happens to be God, then yeah, cool. But if you're not, then I think it's a lot harder to fall into organized religion, and I guess, I mean, I'm, I, I know there's plenty of exceptions to that rule. I'm sure there'll be an episode on cults where perfectly normal people get pulled into something. But yeah, I think, you know, if you're not taught that, you know, there's someone watching your every move and things that I personally roll my eyes at. But you know, this person, this sky daddy cares that you're having sex before you sign a piece of paper. Um, then you probably won't care, right? And then it's on our outline, and I know we disagree on this. The book also said that our set of morals come from religion, and I can see this in a very, like, long term scope. You know, the ten, you know, prehistoric that, you know, you steal my corn from me and then I die. And now I don't like you because my kids are dead because they didn't have enough to eat. Like, I can get that from a moral standpoint, but I don't necessarily see how, uh, more modern religions in the last 2000 years affect our morals, because there's some really terrible stuff in all of the books, like don't I'm not picking favorites here. Yeah, but that, that teaches morals. Like, yeah, there's a lot of good stuff, but there's a lot of bad stuff. And I just don't see how, like, I don't see how that is something that we've been able to muddle through without. Like I said, long term. Oh, you killed my husband. I'm sad like, now like that's where your morals come from. But, you know, it's in the early books of the Bible. You can throw in your citation because I don't know about where the girls get their dad drunk and rape him. Like I almost threw up reading that one. I was like, well, this is so gross. So how do you separate that from, you know, don't covet and don't?

[00:31:27] Preston Meyer: Why should we separate it from that? Story is not told as a good example of what people can and should be. It's it's meant to be a horror story.

[00:31:35] Katie Dooley: Okay, good. Because there's really not a lot of context around it.

[00:31:39] Preston Meyer: No, it's it's really weak in the context area. There's a Lot and his wife and his daughters leave a town while it's being rained on by hellfire. And they happen to survive, except for the wife who turns into a pillar of salt, which obviously chemically makes no sense at all. And so the wife dies. It could be some narrative tool to describe something else. Who knows? The wife dies. Lot and his two daughters whose names I can't remember off the top of my head. Go hide in a cave and think they're the last people on Earth and there is no part of the Torah that says it's okay for a man to sleep with his daughters. It is specifically and explicitly forbidden. The girls do it anyway because they're dumb, and think that they need to repopulate the Earth with their very limited gene pool, because apparently it worked twice before.

[00:32:35] Katie Dooley: Now we're all mouth breathers.

[00:32:36] Preston Meyer: So it's a horror story that happens to be scripture. But yeah, no, I've heard a lot of people think that that's actually meant to be a good role model story, which.

[00:32:52] Katie Dooley: I mean, I definitely don't think it's that, but but I guess my is, you know, there's not a lot of context, right? They don't say this is bad. You shouldn't do it. They just say these girls get their dad drunk and rape him.

[00:33:05] Preston Meyer: But, um later on in the story, lot does wake up and say, what the hell are you doing? This is a terribly sinful thing. Why have you done this to me? So there's that little bit of helpful context that is not strong enough.

[00:33:22] Katie Dooley: Well, yeah and then, I mean, if you think thou shalt not kill, there's a ton of killing in the Bible, right? So, like I said, I can see long term prehistoric for the survival of people, you know. Yeah. Don't kill people, don't rape people. It fucks them up and makes them...

[00:33:40] Preston Meyer: Basket cases in almost every case.

[00:33:43] Katie Dooley: Right. Um, you know which which I mean, this is terrible. This is really just boiling it down to its roots, but makes a less productive, less healthy society. Um, yeah. So again, over a course of time, I can see how it shapes our morals. But I don't think because I am not a Christian, I am immoral. And I also didn't have my Christian friends tell me, like, Katie, you shouldn't steal. You shouldn't lie. Like that was fucking Sesame Street.

[00:34:13] Preston Meyer: Right, but if you compare the Christian Standard to, say, the Viking standard, it's okay. Even encouraged to go out and rape and plunder and take what you want from other people because they're other.

[00:34:26] Katie Dooley: Well, and they're religious people. So, you know, do we do we get our morals from religion.

[00:34:32] Preston Meyer: Your morality is informed by your worship. Entirely. And now worship used in the broad sense of things that you deem of worth, things that you deem of value. You've got people who worship themselves. So literally it doesn't matter what it is, if it's not me, it doesn't matter. I'll take what I want. That's my morality. Then you've got people who are very community focused. If it doesn't help my community, it is evil and that's a lot more palatable. But you swing that just a tiny little bit over towards Nazism. If it doesn't help my Aryan community.

[00:35:15] Katie Dooley: My people.

[00:35:16] Preston Meyer: Yeah, then it's evil. And that's how you get very dangerous concentration camps and.

[00:35:22] Katie Dooley: But but again, back to religion. And in the modern context. Yeah, you have Christians that are very moral.

[00:35:33] Preston Meyer: And Christians that aren't,

[00:35:35] Katie Dooley: And Christians that... You get Westboro Baptist Church and 1 in 7 Catholic priests. Yeah. So what you worship, they're all worshiping the same thing. 

[00:35:45] Preston Meyer: Or at least say they are.

[00:35:47] Katie Dooley: Um, and they all have vastly different ideas of what their morals are. And again, as someone who's an atheist who didn't go through church, I know it's not okay to pick at soldiers funerals. I know it's not okay to touch altar boys inappropriately. I would never be in a situation near an altar boy as an atheist. But, um, like, I know these things are wrong, and these are people who are leaders in their community and they're doing it so... 

[00:36:14] Preston Meyer: Most of our Western standard morality, which is very different from the Greek morality that we like to pretend we model ourselves after, like Socrates defended the preservation of slaves, not the not preserving them, like keeping them alive, but just keeping them as slaves. Yeah, the secular morality that we're very familiar with is absolutely the born from Protestant morality. Our public schools come from Protestant schools and they just stop talking about God, but still kept teaching all of the same things. And then we started adding science and things started getting even better.

[00:36:55] Katie Dooley: Or worse, depending on your perspective

[00:36:57] Preston Meyer: Yeah, I mean, as science develops, there seems to be a greater and greater divide between American Christians and people who actually pay attention and understand science and are smart.

[00:37:11] Katie Dooley: Ooh! Shots fired. We're gonna get some hate mail.

[00:37:15] Preston Meyer: There are loads of American Christians who aren't stupid, but I feel like they're outnumbered by the ones who are. But everything that we call secular life is very tightly connected to what used to be the Protestant norm. Even the idea of keeping your religion private and not display it out publicly was a Protestant practice that is dying a little bit among evangelical communities, for example. But there's also political morality, things that have a motivation of ruling people rather than of binding people together that's not terribly different, but I guess not quite the focus of this discussion.

[00:37:59] Katie Dooley: Another episode.

[00:38:00] Preston Meyer: But is also incredibly complicated. So it's it's definitely not fair to say, oh, you're an atheist. There's no way you could possibly be moral. That's nonsense. The Christian majority on this planet has done an excellent job of imposing good morals on people, while also doing a terrible job of illustrating them on a regular basis. 

[00:38:19] Katie Dooley: Or enforcing themselves.

[00:38:21] Preston Meyer: Absolutely. People have frequently proven that they are terrible at self-government.

[00:38:30] Katie Dooley: Shopping carts,

[00:38:31] Preston Meyer: Right? Shopping carts are probably my favorite example. If you can't be trusted to put a shopping cart where it's supposed to be parked when you're done with it, where where do you think you belong in society?

[00:38:44] Katie Dooley: Put your shopping carts back, people, if you're listening to this,

[00:38:47] Preston Meyer: Right. That's why. That's why they implemented the stupid token. Throwing a quarter, throwing a dollar thing into the little push thing to unlock it so that you have to put it back to get your dollar back. And people still don't do it.

[00:39:00] Katie Dooley: That's also a conversation in economics, which is not this podcast, but...

[00:39:04] Preston Meyer: But yeah, there's there's loads of atheists who absolutely are good people. 

[00:39:08] Katie Dooley: Keep talkin'. 

[00:39:10] Preston Meyer: There's actually a great story. Um, it's attributed to an old rabbi almost a couple of thousand years ago who was approached by a student and he said, God created everything, right. And the rabbi is like, yeah, God created everything. He created the plants, the animals, the air that you breathe, everything that you need to live and the kids like and and everything is good, right? So the rabbi is like, well, yeah, it's all good. It's meant to be a blessing to everybody in the world. And the kid's like, well, what about atheists? Which I mean, sounds... If you stop the story here, it's like, well, obviously there must be an exception to the rule. Atheists are terrible, right? And I mean, their experience in first century, second century Mediterranean atheists were almost always terrible to anybody who believed in God called barbarians, even though actually a lot of barbarians were just enjoying a different theology. Atheists were considered dangerous. They didn't answer to anybody. And so it's a very real concern for this little Jewish kid. And the rabbi has the best explanation ever. He says that atheists exists to make the faithful better.

[00:40:24] Katie Dooley: Oh, I like that. I like warms my little heart.

[00:40:26] Preston Meyer: Right? But but it's it's even more complicated and deeper and more positive than that, that when something terrible happens, you have so many faithful, faithful air quotes who will happily say, I will pray for you and hopefully God will help you. An atheist isn't going to say that one because it's a stupid thing to say. Even a properly faithful person should realize that that's a stupid thing to say. And so the rabbi explains to the kid that an atheist isn't going to say, I'll pray for you and send you on your way. He's going to do what he can to help you because he knows no one else will. And so in a time of hardship, you should think to yourself, what would an atheist do? An atheist is going to help. And so as a faithful person, the rabbi says to the child, you should pray that God will help, but then get off your ass and do something about it.

[00:41:25] Katie Dooley: They said ass in the first century?

[00:41:26] Preston Meyer: I'm paraphrasing a whole lot. I don't have this text in front of me. It's cool to read the story the way it's written, but I am paraphrasing a lot. But you've got I haven't found any biblical translation that meets my criteria, but Paul absolutely said shit in the New Testament we just translate it into a softer language because we don't like to have people swearing in church all the time. But so that that idea that the rabbi teaches the kid about atheists, I think is really helpful, that there are loads of atheists with good morality. And sometimes you have to pretend just for a moment that God isn't going to help.

[00:42:09] Katie Dooley: We'll do a full episode on atheism at some point, just like everything else.

[00:42:14] Preston Meyer: Yeah we can't leave that out.

[00:42:16] Katie Dooley: No. Well, we might lump it in. We're gonna break down all all the religions, the big ones in the coming weeks so that we have a foundation to do the rest of our episodes off of. Um, maybe we'll throw it in there.

[00:42:30] Preston Meyer: Yeah. So back to that, the morality thing, and I think I had mentioned it a little earlier, there's this idea that might is right, it's still popular today. You still see all over the place somebody who wants to argue with you and they're willing to fight you physically to show that they're right, which makes no sense at all. If somebody wants to beat me up because I think the world is a globe instead of a disk, there's no correlation between the two. I might lose that fight. That doesn't mean I'm wrong about the world being a globe but that is a method of establishing authority, which again, religion is in a position where that's a lot of their history and magic, only a tiny little bit. And science, not at all. That's not the basis of their authority at all.

[00:43:25] Katie Dooley: It would be hilarious to have scientists punching people and I'm sure some scientists want to punch people.

[00:43:32] Preston Meyer: Oh, absolutely. If you watch enough Bill Nye, you know that he is fighting the urge to be violent. Not all the time, obviously, but definitely sometime.

[00:43:42] Katie Dooley: Definitely sometimes.

[00:43:45] Preston Meyer: I watched part of a really intense debate between Bill Nye and some theologian down the street.

[00:43:53] Katie Dooley: I pulled that up because I wanted to. We were sort of talking near it, and I, uh, yeah, didn't get to bring it up, but it was Bill Nye and Ken Ham back in 2014, and...

[00:44:04] Preston Meyer: And neither of them got anywhere with the other guy.

[00:44:06] Katie Dooley: No, but I remember Bill Nye saying that I think it was one of the last questions. I don't know, but I really stood out to me. And the moderator asked, what would change your mind? And Bill Nye said, proof and Ken Ham said, nothing. Uh, which I think when we're talking about, you know, evangelicals and, and objecting to science like that, like that blows my mind, right? If Bill Nye had proof that creationism was real, he'd be like, yeah, creationism is real and to not budge like that, like that keeps us in the dark ages.  And I think long term that will hurt religion, whatever religion it is. You know there are other religions that take firm stances like that. Um, but I think in the long term that will hurt religion as we learn more and as we I just as we become more aware of others.

[00:45:08] Preston Meyer: The religions that are going to find the least conflict in the development of science are going to be the ones who make no specific claims at all which they exist. The idea of them growing while making no specific claims is bewildering.

[00:45:30] Katie Dooley: But I guess in some ways that's like, let's just sweep it under the rug and then every person can decide for themselves what they believe. But yeah, once I take a firm stance on like, science isn't real, that sounds so wrong to say will will shrink because.

[00:45:46] Preston Meyer: Science is getting pretty strong.

[00:45:48] Katie Dooley: Well, it's getting strong. And we're, you know, having some real world examples of, you know, coronavirus on scientists are saying one thing. We're ignoring them and people are getting sick and dying.

[00:46:00] Preston Meyer: Well, you've got all these faith healers, especially the big televangelists who make a show of these fancy healing miracles they're happy to do on their stage with actors. They're not going to hospitals and healing people who are dying of coronavirus. You've got some people who say, well, it's just God punishing people. So of course I'm not going to go in there and help them which is nonsense. Like that's I don't know if you could come up with a more self-destructive evil position to hold than coronavirus is meant to be a punishment from God. Perfectly reasonable people who I don't think it's safe to say are the worst of sinners are dying. While very terrible people are not.

[00:46:45] Katie Dooley: I don't know where my brain's going with this, but did we explain the beginning of Modern Religion? We talked around it a lot.

[00:46:53] Preston Meyer: We did talk around it a little bit, didn't we?

[00:46:55] Katie Dooley: But basically it was used to organize society. It developed into more magical things. Then it got more organized and developed a set of morals that we sort of still live by. But I'm a good person, even though I've never been to church. Yeah, is my thesis statement.

[00:47:16] Preston Meyer: Yes. Your position of you can be moral without being religious is 100% correct, but I am disinclined to believe that morality is going to pop up in a vacuum. Okay, I use that that sentence wrong. Morality is a nonsense word in itself without a qualifier.

[00:47:37] Katie Dooley: That's true and it's something we'll never know because there's always been some sort of religion guiding people.

[00:47:45] Preston Meyer: Absolutely and so it's almost like it's just a mental exercise.

[00:47:49] Katie Dooley: Yeah. I, I'm thinking far too hard for a Sunday afternoon at this point, but any last thoughts on...

[00:47:56] Preston Meyer: The Golden Rule is a wonderful thing. It's taught by almost every major religion. Well, it's taught by every major religion and most minor religions. The idea that if you don't want somebody to be a dick bag to you, maybe you shouldn't be a dick bag to them.

[00:48:14] Katie Dooley: Well, and that's that's where I think morality could have developed if we and again, it's sort of a ridiculous idea because there's always been some sort of deity. I think morality could have developed without religion because stuff sucks, right? Like I said, if you killed my husband, I would be very upset and I would know how much it would hurt someone if I killed their husband or loved one or, you know, same with theft or.

[00:48:45] Preston Meyer: But revenge and demands for justice are also pretty great with strong arguments to support them even.

[00:48:56] Katie Dooley: Give me one.

[00:48:58] Preston Meyer: Well, say you kill my wife. Would it not be just for me to exact the same sort of suffering upon you? The Golden Rule says don't do that even though justice says no, you totally deserve it.

[00:49:12] Katie Dooley: Fair and this then turns into an interesting offshoot of capital punishment and religion, because often people in favor of capital punishment are religious.

[00:49:23] Preston Meyer: Usually. Usually. I mean the Bible. The Torah specifically says that capital punishment is appropriate. The interesting thing about an eye for an eye is that it's really easy to look at it from our perspective, where that's worse than what we have now. But when that was given as a law, it was actually far more generous than what was normal. Like, if you stab me in the eye in Egyptian era Israel, it was totally acceptable for me to kill you, which is extreme, extreme escalation. And then it got moderated in the days of Moses, and it got moderated even further in the Christian era by this idea that you need to be more merciful, you need to be better than your enemy.

[00:50:19] Katie Dooley: But I...

[00:50:20] Preston Meyer: Morally better rather than...

[00:50:22] Katie Dooley: Can't go back 2000 plus years. But I imagine keeping society in line when you don't have modern day police forces and lawyers and judges. 

[00:50:32] Preston Meyer: Put the fear of God in them.

[00:50:33] Katie Dooley: Well, the fear of God in it. Yeah, fear of God. And the fact that my eye is gonna get stabbed out probably keeps people in line. And, I mean, there's examples of countries like Singapore that have really high penalties. Um, and you can go to a mall in Singapore and have money pouring out your purse will still be there. 

[00:50:33] Preston Meyer: Because you're worried about your hand getting cut off.

[00:50:51] Katie Dooley: Because you're worried about your hand getting cut off. Yeah. So it's probably yeah, I mean, these are all just ways to moderate people's behaviors in society. And I mean, the golden rule is probably the most humane.

[00:51:04] Preston Meyer: It's the one that's the easiest to understand. The reciprocal imperative is very straightforward. If I don't want to get hurt, don't hurt somebody else. It's the economics of self-preservation. But also it's a really good way to deal with the world around you.

[00:51:26] Katie Dooley: I mean, I guess an eye for an eye is the golden rule, just a little more gory.

[00:51:31] Preston Meyer: It's slightly more enforced.

[00:51:33] Katie Dooley: Yeah, right but, yeah, do unto others, as you had done to you. I guess it would be the.

[00:51:40] Preston Meyer: Yeah.

[00:51:41] Katie Dooley: This is a little more proactive.

[00:51:43] Preston Meyer: It is. And that is ultimately the intent of our new understanding of the golden rule versus the eye for an eye. It's yeah meant to reduce that violence rather than aggravate.

[00:51:56] Katie Dooley: That's all for our first episode of the Holy Watermelon Podcast. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a five-star review.

[00:52:04] Preston Meyer: Peace be with you.

It's nice to meet you!

We love talking about all things religion and how it impacts our lives and our world. We want to start a healthy conversation around religious traditions and behaviours and challenge some ideas.

The Holy Watermelon podcast is a comparative religious studies podcast. That means we talk about all religions across the globe - their histories, beliefs and practices. 

Whether you want to learn more about your faith, challenge your preconceived notions of religion, or have some fun facts for your next dinner party, there is a Holy Watermelon episode for you.

Meet the Hosts

Preston is a Religious Studies graduate, which is to say that he studies religions (with a minor in Christian Theology). Combining this education with certificates and diplomas from theological schools, he is prepared to tackle not only the wide world of religion but the tough issues of his own Christian community.

Katie calls herself a religious studies hobbyist. With one university course, and dozens of books and documentaries under her belt, her curiosity keeps her asking “why?”. As an atheist, Katie has always found it fascinating how people choose which supernatural beliefs they believe in and how it influences their decisions.

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